


Static

by teamchaosprez



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Friendship, Ghosts, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Psychic Abilities, Trans Female Character, Trans Ikusaba Mukuro, Trans Male Character, Trans Naegi Makoto, Trans Oma Kokichi, Trans Saihara Shuichi, the v3 characters are the kids of the dr1 and sdr2 kids
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-11-06
Packaged: 2019-05-15 04:08:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 26,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14783315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teamchaosprez/pseuds/teamchaosprez
Summary: Shuichi Saihara prefers to ignore his psychic abilities and tendency to see the dead walking among the living, but when he has to investigate the abandoned Hope's Peak Academy, that strategy might not work any longer.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is pretty personal to me and i'm excited to be sharing it. i'm not telling who the parents of the v3 kids are just yet, i wanna see if you can guess ;)

_cover art by opossumindulgence.tumblr.com_

There was a little girl with a bright blue dress and ribbons in her hair. She was crying, had been since long before he arrived at the crime scene and didn’t seem to be anywhere near stopping. If this were any normal little girl, Shuichi would certainly have stopped long ago to ask her what she knew, what she had witnessed, have Kaede try and soothe the kid so that he could ask her for whatever information she could give, get just that littlest bit closer to solving the crime and revealing the truth, bringing whoever was responsible to this for justice and going home with the satisfaction of a job well done.

This was not a normal little girl, though, and Shuichi could tell that because he was currently examining her corpse.

Kaito and Kaede couldn’t see her. If they could, they would have reacted long ago. People usually had some form of reaction upon spotting apparitions; there was a reason they were so popular on the Internet along with poltergeist activity and so many other paranormal happenings. They weren’t that exciting for Shuichi, though - everywhere he went, he saw and heard the dead, felt little pushes in his intuition to lead him to the truth. Other people would _kill_ for his ability, for even the slightest hint of the hundreds of people around them that didn’t know they were dead or weren’t ready to die. Shuichi Saihara, however… he preferred to pretend that this ability didn’t exist.

A useful skill for his detective work? Maybe… but it would also make him uncredible for anyone even slightly skeptical of the existence of ghosts and psychic knowledge. His business would be dead in seconds if he ever even hinted that the spirit of the person whose murder he was trying to solve led him in the right direction. His abilities had never caused him anything but difficulties, so he preferred to be vocal in his belief that ghosts and spirits and anything like them didn’t exist, and he preferred to ignore spectres like the girl wailing and begging the police around her for help.

The body had been pulled from the mud of the nearby swamp, and had been there for at least two days. It was covered in mud and slime, but the fact that she was mostly submerged had been enough to fend off any animals that may have wanted to snack on it. A young girl, estimated to be between eleven and thirteen years old, signs of sexual assault on her body and her cause of death a very obvious slit in her throat; blood had mingled with the mud there to make a rather unpleasant sight.

Shuichi poked at her body a couple of times, making sure that he knew everything he could gather from it, but knowing to leave that to the autopsy report. He looked around the surrounding area, dug around, found a man’s jacket and a single shoe, fleeing footprints. He took images of whatever evidence he could find, but didn’t take them yet for the sake of preserving the crime scene aside from the body at the moment. Within a very short amount of time, the crying of the child was drowned out as he entered the zone and became entirely focused on the case at hand.

A hand slapped against his shoulder, and Shuichi very nearly jumped out of his skin, turning around quickly and with hazel eyes wide and fearful to see Kaito grinning at him. “Have you found anything interesting, sidekick?” he asked, and the detective had to take several moments to let his heart rate slow back down to normal before letting out a small sigh. Now that he had been distracted from his concentration, the grating wails of the ghost child were overwhelming again.

“The murderer was pretty sloppy. They didn’t even bother to get rid of most of their evidence. I think we can assume that the girl’s death was unplanned.” Shuichi glanced back at the corpse, a heavy sigh leaving him and his eyes closing for just a moment before opening again. “We just need to find out the identity of this girl and find a match to the fingerprints that we dusted and we should be able to have this case solved pretty quickly.” He removed his hat to run a hand through his hair, before promptly putting it back in place. “Can you go double check with the police, see if they found a match to the kid?”

Kaito nodded and saluted, turning quickly to make his way back over to the policeman in charge of the case. Shuichi watched him for just a moment, glanced around several times to make sure that nobody was looking over in his direction, and kneeled down to face the ghost of the crying girl. “Look,” he spoke quietly, his tone quiet and exhausted - he never, _never_ took advantage of his ability to communicate with the dead, but was getting tired of her loud sobs distracting him… and he felt a little bad to leave a crying child without reassurance and a little bit of comfort, even if she was dead. “I’m trying to get to the bottom of this case. I promise we’ll catch the person who did this to you and put them in jail so they can never hurt anybody else, okay?”

The girl’s big blue eyes widened, tears still leaking out - her wails had been cut off, though, now that she had actually been acknowledged. She nodded, and Shuichi let out a heavy sigh before straightening back up and acting like he hadn’t just conversed with a ghost. It was an art that he was well versed in, though he very rarely needed to use it anymore; even if he wasn’t leaning over their body, he could tell when they were the undead, and he almost always just ignored the people with a blue tint to their skin and a slightly electric energy around them lest he be seen conversing with someone that wasn’t there for everyone else. It was something he was bullied constantly about as a child.

“Shuichi!” He heard the upbeat voice of his childhood best friend and other investigation partner call him, and Kaede practically skipped over to him with a big smile on her face. A little too cheerful for someone investigating the murder scene of a little girl, most people would think, but Shuichi thought that her positive attitude had a tendency to keep him, the police, and other investigators on site sane. Detective work was a job, and if you let everything affect and deter you, then you would psychologically break within a week. So many terrible things happened in the world, and Shuichi respected Kaede’s ability to keep a big smile on her face and a spring in her step no matter what they were investigating.

“There was a kid’s backpack in the woods, about sixty yards away from the body,” Kaede explained, turning on the digital camera that she always carried with her and handing it to Shuichi. He scrolled through the pictures of the crime scene she had taken; most of them footprints, the girl’s discarded ribbons, and as promised, a pink backpack with a cartoon character decorating its front pocket. His brows furrowed, and he moved through the other images that Kaede had captured of the bag and its contents - a folder with homework inside, a notebook full of class notes, a manga volume.

What caught his eye, though, was that the owner’s name was very clearly scrawled in neat handwriting on the inside of the backpack. Himari Kobayashi, a ten year old girl who had been reported missing by her parents about a week before. Well… that was their victim identified, at least, now they just needed to figure out who the culprit was. “How do you always manage to spot the things I don’t?” he asked as he handed her camera back, and Kaede just grinned at him and shrugged.

The two of them double checked the crime scene one more time, taking pictures of whatever evidence they hadn’t gotten already and collecting fingerprints from anything the culprit may have touched. They would have to send them over to a forensics lab, considering their tiny agency didn’t have the funds nor the professionals to run one, but as soon as they got the results Shuichi was sure that this case would be solved and the girl’s family would receive closure.

He should have been happy about the relatively quick solution to the murder case, but as he walked back to the car with Kaito chattering about an upcoming meteor shower and Kaede interjecting with her thoughts whenever she could - most of her statements about how she wanted to go have a picnic during the meteor shower with her girlfriend Maki Harukawa, which Shuichi couldn’t have found less surprising if he tried to - the detective couldn’t help but feel a little… disappointed.

He became a detective because he was passionate about finding the truth and helping justice be brought to murderers and other criminals, but every case now seemed to have a sloppy culprit and a very quick solution. It was… starting to get a little boring, and he was frustrated that his life’s passion had become the daily grind, but at the same time he knew there wasn’t much he could do about it. There was always the option of using his psychic abilities to push him in the direction of new unknown evidence, but… he felt like that was… cheap. Not to mention he didn’t know what Kaede or Kaito would think; he told Kaede about his ability to see ghosts and sense things that others couldn’t, but that was when they were still in elementary school, and he hadn’t brought it up since. Kaito didn’t know anything about the less natural side of Shuichi, however, and was easily spooked by the idea of spirits and the like; he probably wouldn’t want anything to do with the detective if he knew.

He didn’t really care if the public would think less of him, which they definitely did, but Kaito and Kaede had helped him through so many rough patches in his life that he couldn’t even begin to imagine the idea of either up and abandoning him over abilities he could hardly control and was dumb enough to bring up with them.

Shuichi leaned back in the passenger’s seat, watching the buildings of the city they operated in appear again as they left the countryside and whiz past. This place had been hit hard by the apocalypse around twenty years in the past, but aside from a few memorials to the people whose lives were lost, it was almost impossible to tell just by looking at the large and bustling town; before Shuichi was even born, it was back to normal, but with one major difference; the closure of the world famous and widely controversial Hope’s Peak Academy, a massive high school from which the Tragedy had grown.

His mother had attended, and she saw no reason to lie to him - Shuichi knew a lot about the school and the killing games that had occurred there. She never went into detail, and she always looked sad when he asked too many questions, so he usually quickly went quiet and shrunk back after just a couple of answers.

He wasn’t sure why, but whenever Kaito had to drive them out to the countryside and the looming tower that was the old abandoned school came into view, Shuichi felt a little sick. He liked to pass it off as knowing that he was looking at such a dark part of history, and that anyone would feel that way when looking at such a building, but he knew that something else was up with the place. He was… afraid of it.

Shuichi was scared of a lot of things, it was true, but the sick feeling lingering in his gut as Hope’s Peak faded from view seemed more foreboding than his anxiety usually was.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A visit from a friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kaito + kirumi half siblings  
> kirumi + rantaro twins
> 
> shuichi has no siblings, nor does kaede. kaede is dating maki.

The notes in his dream journal were scribbled and messy. Shuichi didn’t think much of his dreams, tried to ignore the idea that they somehow meant something more than just being images conjured up by his mind in its most strange and vulnerable state, but he found that it was interesting to look back at them and process them later. Tonight’s was in that category, so he sat up in his bed at just after five in the morning, the only light coming from the red illumination of his digital clock and the streetlights pouring in through the window. He was straining his eyes a little bit as he jotted down what he could remember in messy handwriting.

Walking down an empty, darkened, and silent hallway; hearing only the voices of people calling out for help, to be saved, to be let go. A red door with an odd texture at the end of the hallway, and every step he took towards it made him feel sick to his stomach; by the time he reached it, he felt as though he was about to collapse, about to vomit, but he stayed strong, put his hand at the handle, sucked in a deep breath. He pushed the door open, fell into the void, felt ten voices and ten sets of hands screaming his name, screaming, screaming, screaming…

Shuichi shuddered just thinking about it, and set down his pen. He ran a hand through his hair and exhaled shakily; there was no way he was going to be getting back to sleep after that. He turned so that his feet hit the floor and got up on uneasy legs; walked across the apartment above his business in order to get himself some coffee and get ready for a long day. He calmed down slowly as he enjoyed his morning caffeine; just a dream, just a dream, it couldn’t hurt him.

It wasn’t real.

* * *

 

Shuichi loved his friends dearly, but sometimes he couldn’t help but question why he made the decision to hire them. It wasn’t that they weren’t capable or weren’t smart (okay, maybe Kaito was a little dumb, but he tried his best) - they were just… very,  _ very _ easily distracted. There was a reason he didn’t allow Kaede’s girlfriend to enter the office anymore and had to block NASA’s website from their WiFi. If anything was going to get done and any cases were going to be solved, he needed to make sure that anything that could take their attention was kept hidden away.

So when he heard Kaito give a delighted shout and footsteps sprint into the reception area, he didn’t think it was anything to be worried about, but he did give a heavy sigh as he put down the case files he was trying to read through. Shuichi shoved himself back from his desk, letting the back of his rolling chair hit the wall behind him as he got up and left his office. He wasn’t expecting much; a visiting friend, probably, or maybe their first customer besides the police in a while.

He certainly wasn’t expecting to find both.

Kaito had wrapped his half sister Kirumi Tojo into a bear hug, and she looked dishevelled and annoyed but just as proper as ever. She encased herself completely in her work, stopped talking to pretty much anyone when she got a new assignment, so it was strange for her to be seen away from whatever house or other building she was currently working in. As far as Shuichi knew from listening to Kaito and their other sibling, Rantaro Amami, rambling, she just got a pretty impressive assignment… so while it was a pleasant surprise to see her in the office, it was also more than a little strange.

“Ah, Shuichi,” she addressed him quickly and with a pleasant smile, pulling out of her brother’s grasp in order to approach him and curtsy politely. He’d tried to tell her that there was really no need to be that proper with him before, but she didn’t listen, so he gave up pretty quickly. “I’m relieved to see you. I hate to admit it, but I have a request of my own today.” She straightened up, hands folding in front of her lap and her head tilting slightly. “Are you aware of the assignment I was given recently? Of caring for and cleaning up the abandoned Hope’s Peak Academy?”

He blinked. “I wasn’t aware that you have to be in Hope’s Peak, but Kaito told me you got something big and exciting.” A small pause. Of course, there was a possibility that she was just visiting to tell him and Kaede that piece of good news, but it was deeply unlikely for her - based on the patterns of her behavior for as long as he’d known her (so, their entire lives), he knew that she didn’t really like to talk about herself or her achievements to anybody but perhaps her fathers and siblings so that they knew where she was, and left any bragging about herself to them. She was, honestly, a little too humble and devoted to others for her own good sometimes.

Shuichi was ripped out of his internal monologue rather quickly, though, when Kirumi spoke up again. “Ever since I began working there, I have begun hearing noises and feeling the presence of others all over the school. Whenever I go to check, however, I find nothing out of place. Something glass shattering in the trash room. A thud in the gymnasium. A crash in the locker rooms, a crack in the repository. A woman’s scream in one of the dorms on the first floor.” She shook her head. “I believed it was my imagination at first, my mind conjuring up sounds because I was alone in a… somewhat creepy place. It’s gone on long enough, though, that I believe it to be something more. A group of homeless people living in the building or a gathering of teenagers stirring up trouble, perhaps.”

“So you want us to check it out, see if we can find the source of the noises?” Shuichi asked, crossing his arms over his chest and watching his friend with an eyebrow raised. He did not want to enter that building, and that was at the forefront of his mind. He could never get it out of his head that Hope’s Peak was a place where something terrible had happened, where the school’s corruption contributed immensely to the apocalypse and innocent people -- innocent  _ kids _ \-- a group that included his  _ mother _ \-- had been forced to kill each other, forced to do terrible things in order to survive until only six remained. Hope’s Peak Academy was his worst nightmare, if he was being honest, and even though Kirumi was his dear friend and he wanted her to feel safe in her place of work, he wasn’t willing to go inside for a few minutes, let alone for a thorough investigation of the premises. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to decline. It doesn’t seem like something that requires a lot of detective work.”

“Dude, what if it’s somebody dangerous? You heard her, she’s been hearing crashes and thuds and shit. What if she gets hurt?” Kaito spoke up before Kirumi could even have the chance to do anything in response to Shuichi’s refusal. “I don’t care whether or not it’s something that requires a lot of investigating. Kirumi is my sister and your friend. We should make sure that she’s safe no matter what.”

“If they were planning on hurting me, I am sure they would have done it already, Kaito,” Kirumi addressed him in a calm and collected tone, and put her hand on his shoulder, but Shuichi had already spotted the slightest change to her expression. The usual pensive and thoughtful frown had dipped a little deeper, her brows had furrowed ever so slightly, and in her green eyes he could see… fear. His chest lurched a little with guilt, and not for the first time, Shuichi realized that Kaito was right.

So he shook his head. “No, no, forget it. Yeah, Kirumi, we’ll check it out.” He saw her open her mouth to speak, and he put one hand up. “No payment necessary, I don’t care what you have to say about that one. You get friends and family discount, and you being safe at work is the only thing I really need in return, okay? Do the sounds only happen at night?”

Kirumi nodded. “Typically between midnight and five in the morning, though sometimes I’ve heard noises in the storage room and repository during the morning hours.”

“Okay.” Shuichi had already moved to the computer at the front desk, quickly marking a date and time into his schedule there. “Kaito, Kaede, and I will come to the school tomorrow night at about eleven, then. Make sure that you’re ready to let us in by then, and we’ll probably have you stick around while we investigate the campus so that you can tell us what’s normal and what’s not.”

A smile made its way onto Kirumi’s face; small and polite, but still more than she usually gave. The maid bowed slightly, and Shuichi could see gratefulness in tired green eyes. “Thank you, Shuichi, I truly do appreciate it,” she spoke in a soft voice, one gloved hand resting gently on the detective’s shoulder before she stepped away. “Well, it’s been a pleasure to see you both, but I do need to return to work now. I was working on clearing the dead plants from the greenhouse, and it’s much more work than I originally believed it would be. I’ve been working on it for three days now.”

“I hope you’ve taken breaks in the middle of all that,” Kaito piped up, and a sheepish little smile appeared on Kirumi’s face. He shook his head at his younger sister with a heavy sigh, and clapped a hand against her shoulder, making her jump ever so slightly. “Ha, I might just have to talk Rantaro into helping me kidnap you to come home for dinner tonight! Father n’ Dad have been talking a lot about how much they miss having you around. You can take a break from cooking and everything.”

A soft little laugh left the maid, and she stepped away from Kaito in order to walk over to the front door of the office, putting her hand on the handle and looking over at her brother one more time. “No need. I’ll come over regardless, though, but you know I’ll end up cooking no matter what.” She then addressed Shuichi. “Thank you again. I understand this may be something that’s hard for you, and I am in your debt. I’ll see you tomorrow night.” She finally gave a small wave to Kaede through her office window, and walked out of the office, the bell on the door chiming above her as she did so.

“Aw, man, I can’t believe I missed her,” Kaede’s voice sounded as she opened the door to her office, pouting slightly and with her cheeks puffed out just a bit. “She never comes to see us… did she want something important? She must have, if she left her work in the middle of the day.” The pianist stepped out and walked over to the front desk, pulling herself up to sit there and swing her legs slightly. Shuichi usually would have scolded her for that, but he didn’t have the heart to at the moment.

“Yeah. She says she’s been hearing weird noises in Hope’s Peak while she’s alone in the building, so the three of us are heading over there tomorrow night at eleven to check it out.”

Kaede blinked at him. She knew that he was freaked out by the school, so she was probably more than a little surprised that he agreed to step even five hundred feet in the direction of the abandoned academy. Still, a small smile appeared on her face, and she let out a little laugh. “Weird sounds, huh? Maybe it’s a ghost.”

God, he hoped not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this boy is gonna get so spooked


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shuichi and friends arrive at the school.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i've decided this fic will be saimota but it'll be more like a background thing than anything else.

As Shuichi stood in front of Hope’s Peak Academy twenty minutes before he was set to enter it, he began to have second thoughts about whether or not to actually go through with this job. The building towered above him in a way he had never really seen this close, and it gave off an aura that made him feel a little bit dizzy and nauseous. Kaede and Kaito stood on either side of him, but even with the close proximity of the two people who could keep him calm no matter what, Shuichi’s anxiety was through the ungodly tall roof of the school and his heart was pounding in his chest.

After having gotten wind of what was going on, Kirumi’s twin brother Rantaro had tagged along with his boyfriends Kokichi Ouma and K1-B0, one of whom would need to be brutally injured to stay away from anything even mildly interesting and the other not wanting to let the boys he loved so much rush into something dangerous alone. Shuichi honestly didn’t think that this situation would get frightening, but he wasn’t about to doubt that being in a place where so much death had happened would get interesting, so he didn’t fight them on it. As long as Kokichi promised not to mess with anything that could be evidence or something of the sort.

He agreed, but Shuichi made a mental note to keep an eye on him through the night to make sure that he wasn’t just speaking to get the detective off his back. Not that he didn’t  _ trust _ Kokichi, because he did - he was an intelligent and loyal force of nature that knew how to keep a secret when he needed to and could be kind when he wasn’t busy being a little shit bordering on cruel - but he knew his friend well, and knew that he liked to lie about his intentions and then run off and do whatever he wanted. It was only really a problem whenever he allowed Kokichi to tag along on investigations.

Rantaro, on the other hand, was a low level psychic, and one of the few people Shuichi had opened up to about his ability to see the dead and sense the future. He was very accepting, if a little strange and cryptic at times, and Shuichi had absolutely no problems with inviting him along - he might notice a few things that the detective himself did not. He was one of the few people who could even think about controlling Kokichi’s impulses and trying to be a voice of reason for him.

The other person that could fit that description was K1-B0, better known to friends as Kiibo. He was a robot with an AI that grew like a human child’s brain, and although he hadn’t had his actual physical body for very long, he was about the same age mentally as the rest of them. He was kind, caring, and very matter of fact - but at the same time, he could get sort of impatient with other people, which was why Shuichi wasn’t entirely sure why he and Kokichi loved each other as much as they did. His relationship with Rantaro made some more sense, but from what the detective understood, Kokichi had been the first one to confess romantic feelings to the robot, and was the first one Kiibo liked at all.

Regardless, things seemed to work out okay between the three of them, and Shuichi felt a little better with the investigation when he had that trio along with Kaede, Kaito, and Kirumi around. He still dreaded going inside, yes, but he at least had faith that no real harm would come to him while some of the most helpful people he’d ever met were around. 

“You look like you’ve seen a  _ ghoooost, _ Shuichi!” Kokichi spoke suddenly and loudly, clinging to Shuichi’s arm and making him jump ever so slightly before silently kicking himself for letting his guard down around one of the biggest pranksters he knew. Hazel eyes glanced down at his friend, worried that the small supreme leader knew something about his abilities hence the use of the word  _ ghost, _ but he found nothing but a shit eating grin on the younger boy’s face.

There was nothing to hint that he knew anything more than Shuichi had ever told him, but Kokichi was perceptive, and that alone was enough to make the detective squirm. “I’m just a little nervous about this, that’s all,” he responded, trying to keep his voice flat as he looked up at the tall academy once again. “I haven’t done an investigation that doesn’t involve an actual crime or a dead body for me to look at. At the very most, this is just going to be us double checking for anyone breaking and entering. It’s… a little weird.” Plus, the school had always made him feel nervous.

“Maybe you’re nervous because the school is haunted.” Kokichi really seemed to be laying the supernatural angle really thick, resting his head against Shuichi’s upper arm and blinking up at him through thick eyelashes. “I’m surprised Kaito even wanted to tag along with how spooky this place is! Don’t you know that all the students that were killed in the killing games haunt Hope’s Peak Academy to this day?” A high pitched little giggle left the trickster as he let go of the detective, and Shuichi let out the faintest sigh of relief he could manage. So he didn’t know, he was just trying to freak Kaito out.

It was working, evidently, given how visibly tense Kaito was at Shuichi’s side; the detective was almost a little amused by how easy it was to get him to react. “Come on, man, stop fucking around,” the astronaut in training snapped, shifting a little closer to Shuichi and squeezing against him in a way that made the detective blush ever so slightly. He just pretended it wasn’t happening, thinking that would be easier than facing yet another complicated situation at the moment. “There’s no such thing as ghosts, and even if there were, they’re definitely not here. Kirumi would’ve said something about it if she thought that! She knows I don’t like the occult.”

“Hm, you’re right, she would’ve,” Kokichi rocked on his heels ever so slightly, putting on a mask of being innocent and thoughtful as he let go of Shuichi, choosing instead to drape himself over a very tired looking Kiibo. Shuichi couldn’t help but pity his boyfriends, having to deal with this behavior on a daily basis. “But maybe Kirumi is just too  _ reasonable _ to even think about things like ghosts! She wants to look like a reasonable and intelligent young woman who isn’t affected by the supernatural--”

“It’s just a homeless person or a group of homeless people living in the abandoned school,” Shuichi interrupted him, not even bothering to let him continue this train of thought. He was going to be dizzy and freaked out enough going through this long, long night; he didn’t need Kaito panicking over things he couldn’t even see. That would only make it worse for everyone involved. “Either stop spinning ghost stories to freak everybody out or we’re just going to leave you outside and send you home.”

Kokichi’s shoulders slumped, and he seemed to quiet down now that Shuichi had put his foot down; the detective let out a faint sigh of relief.

Five minutes before the agreed upon time, Shuichi heard a harsh clicking sound from the door before Kirumi appeared, opening the way to enter the school. As he caught his first glance of the darkness beyond the door, he couldn’t help but feel a cold pit of dread settle in his chest. “Thank you all for coming,” Kirumi spoke with a harried sounding voice, bowing ever so slightly. “I don’t know what’s going on, but ever since I heard your car pull up, I’ve been hearing more noises than usual. I apologize for not coming outside to meet you sooner, I attempted to chase the sounds and see if I could trace their sources, but… I had no such luck.” She shook her head. “I hope there being so many of us will allow us to catch whoever is living in the school in the act.” A faint smile appeared on the maid’s face, and she opened the door a little wider, stepping back into the school and gesturing for the others to follow.

He didn’t mean to, but Shuichi hesitated for just a moment. He could very briefly feel Kaede’s concerned gaze land on him for just a second before she trailed after Kirumi. Kaito followed behind her; Rantaro pulled Kiibo and Kokichi along with him hot on his trail. Shuichi watched Kiibo’s back disappear into the dark school, swallowed down the lump that was growing in his throat, and walked into the halls of Hope’s Peak Academy, trying to swallow down his anxiety.

It was fine, it was fine, he would be fine…

The moment he stepped into the door, he felt a wave of nausea and dizziness. Shuichi took another step inside, feeling a strange haze settle over his mind, flashing images of a black and white bear, a red scar for an eye, blood, a boy with long black hair and merciless red eyes, a girl with blonde pigtails and a malicious grin, screaming, blood, why was there so much blood?

_ Thrills, chills, kills! _

Shuichi tried to step forward, but stumbled back, catching himself against the doorway and forcing himself to take a deep breath.

_ It’s… punishment time! _

He felt like he was going to faint. Shuichi put a hand over his forehead, forced himself to take deep breaths, forced himself to try and calm down.

As hs heart rate started to slow back to normal and the panic started to fade, he could feel the haze over his mind start to worsen. He felt a tug in his chest, pulling him further into the school, past his friends as they discussed the details of the school with Kirumi. He wasn’t even thinking, moving on autopilot as he made his way into the main area of the school, making a turn into the hallway.

“Shuichi?”

Kaede’s voice sounded like it was underwater, too far away and distorted for him to understand. He couldn’t acknowledge it if he wanted to. Shuichi kept on walking down the hallway as he saw a massive red door. His heart started to thud a little faster as he recognized it as the door from his nightmare, as he came to realize that was where this strange force was leading him. Part of him wanted to squirm his way out of the weird control that the school had over him, but he didn’t, only wanting to know more, only wanting to know why he was being pulled there.

His hand rested on the doorknob, and the detective hesitated for a moment before pushing it open. The dizzy feeling only worsened as he entered what looked like a very small lobby with a massive elevator. He stepped forward on shaky legs, entered the elevator and felt his chest compress as it began making its shaky way downward, metal clanking accompanying him all the way down as he wondered very briefly if it was a good idea to be using a machine that had been abandoned for twenty years.

That moment of clarity didn’t last.

The doors opened to reveal what looked like a courtroom left in ill repair, and Shuichi could feel rather than see sets of hands grabbing onto him, grabbing onto his arms. Baseballs, the sound of something solid smashing with sickening force into flesh. Ungodly speed and crackles of electricity. Fire, so much fire that it choked him and burned at his legs. The sounds of a computer getting beaten into a pulp, turned into scrap metal. Being crushed under a massive weight with only despair and excitement.

_ Stupid stupid stupid! _

_ I’m sorry. _

_ I had a dream. _

_ For my friends. _

_ It’s punishment time! _

_ Help us. _

_ Help us help us help us help us _

_ Help _

_ Please _

_ Shuichi Saihara _

_ Help us _

_ We’re only kids _

_ Please, Shuichi _

_ please _

Everything went black.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shuichi wakes up in the courtyard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not as many spooks this chapter..... but they will begin soon i promise you

Shuichi came to in the courtyard of the school, feeling grass on the exposed parts of his back and arms. He slowly pulled himself to sit up, rubbing the side of his head and letting out a little groan - it didn’t help much when another body slammed forward to hug him tightly and knocked him back into a laying position, making him hit his head on the ground with an ‘oof.’ He was confused for just a moment, but figured out rather quickly that it was Kaede who was holding tightly onto him and whimpering ever so slightly as she clung to him.

“I was so worried about you!” she whined, tightening her grip and resting her head on his shoulder. “I went to find you when you just walked past everybody like a zombie, and you were just passed out on the ground in the basement, and I thought you were hurt and I didn’t know what to do…” A pang of guilt for scaring her hit his chest, though he knew logically that it wasn’t his fault and he couldn’t have controlled whether or not he fainted. “What happened down there?” she asked, voice a little urgent as she pulled off of him to look at his face. Her brows were furrowed, a frown tugging at the corners of her lips, and another wave of guilt for worrying the friend that was more like a sister hit Shuichi.

He told her, once, about how he could see ghosts. Way back when they were in elementary school, when they were little and Shuichi didn’t really understand that it was something weird. She was a little worried about him, and his mother had a talk with him about hallucinations that evening. He stopped talking about it with her after a while, and she apparently thought he’d grown out of it - he trusted her to believe him and understand what he was going through, but… he was paranoid about a repeat incident, so he chose not to say anything to her about it. Chose to keep quiet for now.

If anything drastic happened, he would have to talk about it; if the ghosts in the school turned out to be too much, he would have to bring it up with her. “It’s nothing,” he lied as he sat back up again, wincing a little at his headache. “It’s not a big deal, I promise, I just… I guess the elevator was a little bit too much for me, old and clanky and stuff, you know?” He gave her a little smile.

She didn’t reply to him, he could see that in her face. Still, she let it go; she knew when to not push him for any answers when he didn’t give them to her outright. “If you say so.” She shrugged, and ran a hand through her hair. “Look, Shuichi, if something is wrong, if you don’t want to go into the school, you don’t have to. We can call the police or something and let them take care of whatever Kirumi is dealing with, you know?” She had a small smile on her face.

He wouldn’t lie, the thought had crossed his mind for a moment; but he didn’t want to call the police now that he knew it was probably something more supernatural. That would probably just leave Kirumi with no answers whatsoever; he figured that if the ghosts here were so powerful that even his non psychic friend could hear them moving around the school, she probably deserved to know that they were around. Not to mention everyone had been so excited to come here and look around - everyone except him and Kiibo, that was, since the robot seemed to be the voice of reason in the group if Kirumi was taken out of the equation. Shuichi let out a heavy sigh.

“No, it’s fine. Let’s just avoid that elevator and the room it leads to for now, okay?” He tried to give her an encouraging smile, though he wasn’t sure how convincing it really was. Shuichi took a look around, found that none of the friends that had accompanied him except for Kaede were outside. A large fountain, no longer in use but not looking any less beautiful than it must have when the school was built. The heavy feeling from inside carried over to the courtyard, but significantly less; the pit in his stomach only deepened every time he looked up at the towering building of Hope’s Peak Academy. “Is everyone else still inside?” he asked, looking back to Kaede.

“Yeah, Kokichi followed me when I went to find you and said he was going to look around the room you passed out in. Kirumi and Rantaro are looking around on the first floor, Kiibo and Kaito went into the dorm area. I texted Kaito and Kirumi about what happened and said I would keep them updated.” Kaede blinked, and pulled out her phone. “I should tell them you’re awake, actually.”

“I need to ask Kirumi a question about that room I passed out in,” Shuichi spoke quietly, about a third to Kaede and mostly to himself. Kaede got up to her feet, reached a hand down to help the detective up; he took her hand and let her yank him into a standing position. “Let’s go ahead and head back inside. We have a lot of investigating to do and some time to make up for.” He noticed a worried expression on her face, and quickly spoke up again. “Look, I know you’re worried, but I’m fine. I just fainted because I was overwhelmed from the rough ride down and how much I was thinking, that’s all. That’s no excuse to give up on trying to find the truth, right?”

The pianist’s smile turned… a little sad as she listened to him talk, and she shook her head - though it wasn’t so much a refusal as it was her clearly being exhausted by Shuichi’s predictability. “You really don’t know when to give up on trying to find answers, do you?” she asked, and as the detective opened his mouth, she held up a hand. “Don’t answer that question, I already know. Let’s just head back into the school and get this night over with, right?”

Shuichi nodded, and turned on his heel in order to walk back towards the school with Kaede at his side, taking his hat from Kaede when she offered it to him as he reached Hope’s Peak and pulled open the door. When he took a step inside, he felt a wave of nausea, but it was significantly less severe than it had been the first time he walked in, and he could easily power through in order to walk from the entrance hall to the main area of the school’s first floor.

He glanced down the hall of the school that he knew would lead to the red door, and a twinge of anxiety rushed into his chest. Shuichi stayed still in the hallway for a moment, listening to the quiet school and waiting until he heard the sound of Kirumi and Rantaro’s voices coming from a room across the hall. Shuichi swallowed his fear, gestured for Kaede to stay put, and approached the door - it was clearly labelled  _ A/V Room, _ and for a moment Shuichi was overwhelmed by the thought that this building was once a school, where people once congregated and learned.

It wasn’t just the place of horrors that history had made it out to be. It wasn’t that history was wrong; this building had seen so much death, so much suffering, so many tears… but it had also fostered life, been a prestigious place of learning that helped some of the most influential people in the world craft lifelong friendships and become the people they turned out to be.

This was where his mother had learned. Met the people who were more like his family, his aunts and uncles, the parents of his best friends now. He didn’t have time to think about any of this now, though; he had a job he needed to do, he had a truth he needed to pursue, and he would be damned if he failed at it when it was his friend that asked him to do this. Shuichi put his hand on the handle to the A/V room and pushed it open, stepping inside to find Kirumi and Rantaro leaning over a screen.

“Oh, Shuichi.” Kirumi straightened up when she saw him enter, folded her arms in front of her and gave him a small smile. “I’m glad to see that you’re awake. I hope you aren’t ill, I would understand if you wanted to leave the school and leave the investigating to the rest of us after your episode.”

He shook his head, approached her and glanced over her shoulder at the screen she and Rantaro were watching. He could see a screen displaying a black and white bear with a single red scar for his left eye, four girls sprawled out on the floor. The entire image was coated in a red that made his stomach churn. When he studied the events of class 78’s killing game, he’d learned about motive videos shown to the students that led to Leon Kuwata’s murder of Sayaka Maizono. Perhaps that’s what this was.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he spoke in a tone more firm than he felt, facing Kirumi and trying not to fidget anxiously. “Look, Kirumi, I have a question for you. When I fainted, I was down in the room that the red door leads to. Can you tell me what its function was before this?”

The maid blinked at him, clearly not having expected that question. “Well, prior to the killing game, it was a room used for human experimentation and the creation of Izuru Kamukura, the Ultimate Hope that caused the reserve course uprising and helped spread despair. The main entrance was across the school grounds, but the elevator was put there for convenience. When Junko Enoshima took over the school, she made the door a lot more gaudy and repurposed the room underground into a courtroom with an execution grounds attached.” She paused for a moment. “That room alone is where a little less than half of the deaths of class 78’s killing game happened.”

That made sense. That was why he’d heard so much calling for help. Shuichi let out a sigh, took off his hat and ran a hand through his dark hair. “Okay. Thank you for answering my question.” He glanced at Rantaro, noticed a knowing look in green eyes, and prayed that he wouldn’t say anything about ghosts in front of Kirumi. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her… he just didn’t want anyone to know anything about his abilities unless he was completely confident in their ability to believe him and not think of him as some freak that needed psychological help.

“Maybe I’ll go have a look at that room, see if the elevator is really dangerous enough to freak out and hurt Shuichi as much as it did. I probably need to check on Kichi and make sure that he’s okay, too.” The green haired boy waved to Kirumi and Shuichi over his shoulder as he walked out of the room, closing the door behind him - part of Shuichi wanted to follow him and explain what had happened, but he thought better of it.

The detective thanked Kirumi once again for answering his question and left the A/V room, walking with Kaede down the hallway until they reached the gymnasium - admittedly, he was excited to do some investigating of his own now that he’d recovered from fainting.

His excitement faded rather quickly, though, when he opened the door, Kaede chattering excitedly by his side about the history of the school she had been catching up on the last day to get ready for the investigation, the conversation she’d had with her mom about it before leaving.

It was clear from the fact that she kept on talking that the girl with the short black bob cut sitting in the middle of the gym floor wasn’t visible to her.

She looked up to Shuichi with tired grey eyes, and when her features registered in his head, his heart skipped a beat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's my girl..... gun lady


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kokichi heads into the courtroom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a nervous little punk boy arrives

Kokichi stepped out of the elevator with a heavy sigh, reaching behind his head to tie messy hair into a small ponytail. He looked around the expansive room that he had just entered, glancing around deep blue walls and fancy red curtains, a black and white checkered floor that made him tug gently at his scarf self consciously. He knew that he had just entered the old trial room from when the school was the home of a killing game, and Kokichi couldn’t help the wave of anxiety and sadness that hit his chest. He didn’t like murder - he didn’t like that innocent kids were sent to kill each other and then were killed in turn. Some of his parents’  _ friends _ had been forced through the killing game.

He wasn’t sure if he was more sad or disgusted, but either way, he felt the need to look around this room as much as he could. As much as he poked fun at Kaito, he did think that something not quite human was going on in the school; god knows that all the death and despair that had gone on in this building was a perfect environment for hauntings to develop. Kokichi wasn’t psychic quite to the level that Shuichi or Rantaro were, but he could sense spirits, and he didn’t doubt that he could communicate with a ghost if they were strong enough, focused enough.

A tall, strong gate stood in between him and a tall second room. Kokichi wrapped his hands around the thick metal, grunted and leaned his entire body weight against the gate trying to force it open. Admittedly, that wasn’t very much, so it took a lot of scuffling against the slick linoleum of the floor for it to finally creak and give way, finally allow him to step into a room that had such a heavy air, smelled so thickly of death that it made him gag.

The small young man pulled his checkered scarf over his mouth and nose, the soft material providing some comfort, making him feel a little safer and protecting his breathing. He steeled himself and kept walking into the big room, and even in the dim lighting he could see a series of sets, almost looking as if they were made for a stage. Dark stains covered some of them, and he felt sick when he realized that they must be blood. Blood left over from the executions twenty years passed.

He heard whimpers, coming from behind one of the sets. He felt his blood go cold. Kokichi sucked in a deep breath as he felt around the nearest wall for a lightswitch, anything that would light up the room and let him see better. After feeling around the walls for a while and failing to find anything, he sighed heavily and stepped slowly towards the source of the sound. Anxiety made his heart pound, a lump in his throat and his breathing uneven. Kokichi slowly approached what looked like a massive scoreboard, sucked in a deeper breath, reached to move it, and…

“Kokichi.”

He jolted to attention, turning quickly on his heel to face the man approaching him. Rantaro looked worried, a frown on his face and his brows furrowed; Kokichi found himself rather quickly enveloped in a gentle embrace, and he rested the side of his face against his boyfriend’s chest. He would normally be happy with being held by one of the boys he loved so much, but he found himself irritated when he noticed that the whimpering behind the scoreboard had come to a stop. He was so close to figuring out answers, finding out a little what was going on in this school, and…

“Are you okay?” Rantaro asked, pulling away and cupping one of his cheeks in his hand and tilting Kokichi’s head so that he had to look up at him. The trickster’s heart melted, and he came to realize that he couldn’t stay mad at the older boy no matter how hard he tried. He sighed heavily and returned the embrace, wrapping his arms around Rantaro’s waist and tucking his face out of his grasp, instead resting his chin against his chest and looking up at him with a pout and violet eyes narrowed.

Kokichi stuck out his tongue, but it didn’t have any heat to it. “I’m okay, nothing was wrong,” he responded, before pulling away from his boyfriend and gently poking his chin. “I was just having a looksy around at whatever was down here. Looks like it’s just a bunch of props and stuff from when the killing game and the executions were happening…” He let out a heavy sigh, turning around in Rantaro’s arms and resting his hands against his boyfriend’s wrists. He felt the older boy’s chin rest against the top of his head, lips pressing a gentle kiss there. A pang of guilt hit Kokichi; he didn’t think he deserved to have anyone be this gentle with him, but that was not an argument he wanted to have right now.

Rantaro hummed softly in response, and Kokichi glanced up at him. “Yeah, well, I dunno what else would be in the old execution room,” he commented calmly, and released the smaller boy before approaching the sets. “I thought I heard something when I was coming down here. Maybe it’s the homeless person Kirumi thinks she’s been hearing moving around the school?”

“Yeah, the whimpering, I heard it too,” Kokichi swallowed, followed his boyfriend with his hands linked behind his back. “There’s probably an explanation like that, especially since they stopped when they heard you talk and I was putting effort towards keeping quiet about it. But… I’m sure you’ve noticed the weird feeling down here, too? I don’t… think it’s something human.” He swallowed, reached one hand out to put it inside of Rantaro’s bigger one, and he was pleased to feel his boyfriend gently squeeze the extremity. “You’ll be able to see it better if it’s what I think it is. But… there was so much death, so much despair here, it’s a perfect environment for ghosts to show up.”

The green haired adventurer nodded, though he didn’t speak as he closed his hands around the edge of the scoreboard. “Here, help me move it, we’re going to find out for sure. Just grab the other end and pull it over, it shouldn’t be too hard.” Kokichi bit his lip, worried that he wouldn’t be strong enough to do it; he didn’t have much physical strength, all of he could manage was mostly mental. But he did his best anyway, grunting slightly with exertion as the two of them forced the scoreboard to move and collapse to the ground away from where it was propped up.

The prop crashed into the cement with a noise that made Kokichi jump and clap his hands over his hands, squeezing his eyes shut and feeling his heart thud in his chest for several moments. He gave himself a few seconds to calm down, for his breathing to return to normal, before his hands fell away from his head. His breath caught in his throat, and he couldn’t believe what he was looking at.

A teenage boy, his skin tinted a deathly blue. His bright red hair was a mess, his face even messier as he looked up to Rantaro and Kokichi with ice blue eyes; eyeliner streaked down his cheeks, clear evidence that he had been crying, and he looked terrified to see the two boys standing before him. Kokichi’s heart pounded in his chest, and he couldn’t keep bright violet eyes from widening; of course he had  _ suspected _ and even expected that paranormal activity had been going on around the long abandoned Hope’s Peak, but he still found himself shocked to come face to face with none other than the first to give in to the killing game of the 78th class - the first to do the unthinkable and commit a murder.

“Leon Kuwata,” Rantaro mused slowly, and Kokichi glanced quickly over at his boyfriend as the older boy crouched down to come face to face with the ghostly murderer. (Was it even fair to call him a murder? Kokichi, as disgusted as he was with the concept of taking another’s life, was more than aware that the teenagers locked in Hope’s Peak had been manipulated into their crimes. He had a lot of conflicting thoughts and feelings on the subject.) “We’re not here to hurt you, we’re just here to help.”

“Help?” the boy repeated, his voice surprisingly clear - the clearest Kokichi had ever heard from a spirit. Leon gave a bitter laugh, and the trickster couldn’t help but shudder, taking a single step back. He had always been told that ghosts couldn’t hurt him, but this one was strong. This one was clear. This one might be very, very angry about the unforgivable situation that he’d been faced with. “How are you supposed to help me? I killed someone in self defense. My classmates voted to kill me in return, and now I’m stuck here and I can’t get out.” Another broken laugh, and Kokichi’s heart sunk.

Maybe the killers of the killing game couldn’t be blamed for their ordeal after all, he supposed. Not if their afterlives were like this. Kokichi was never particularly good at comforting others, especially when genuinity was required, so he chose to stay back for the moment and let Rantaro handle things. Observe the situation, see if there was any information he could memorize and repeat later in either a genuine or twisted fashion. He picked at his sleeves with his fingernails, trying to do something with his hands to keep his mind somewhat occupied.

“You’d be surprised,” Rantaro responded, a gentle smile on his face as he reached a hand out and attempted to rest it on Leon’s shoulder, only for it to go right through his translucent skin. Kokichi grimaced. His boyfriend was a saint, but he wasn’t sure if there was any way to soothe someone who went through what the former baseball star had gone through. “First, though, I have a couple of questions for you. Are you the only victim of the killing game that’s left around the school? I promise we’ll help you get out of here and get to what’s next. You  _ will _ get out of Hope’s Peak.”

Leon blinked, staring at Rantaro with wide blue eyes. Kokichi almost took a step forward to try and step into the conversation, but before he could the ghost spoke again. “... No. The others are all here - the ones from my class, at least, I haven’t been upstairs to the classroom where the student council died because I spend most of my time down here, but… I’ve seen Celeste, Hifumi, Taka, Mondo, Chihiro, and Sakura around. Sayaka and Mukuro haven’t come down here, but the others have mentioned them.” 

Rantaro nodded slowly, and Kokichi let out a breath that he didn’t realize that he was holding in. “Okay, thank you,” the green haired adventurer spoke softly, and straightened up. Kokichi couldn’t help but move a little closer to him, putting his hand in his boyfriend’s for a little bit of security, giving a light squeeze for encouragement. “Listen, we’ll figure something out before the night is over. It’s not just me and Kokichi here, we also have our friends in the school with us - a detective and the kindest girl I’ve ever met and an astronaut that should probably be a motivational speaker and a maid that does her best to help everyone she can and an extremely kind and helpful robot. We’ll help you.”

The baseball player stared at him for a moment, and nodded his agreement before rising to his feet. “I’ll… walk around the school and see if I can gather up the other spirits.” Leon let out a shaky sigh, and gave the two boys a small, small smile. “Thank you.”

“You are so welcome.” The gentle grin didn’t leave Rantaro’s face as Leon stepped past the two humans and left the execution room.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shuichi has a conversation with Mukuro. It goes downhill fast.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> annnd our first character's lineage is revealed!

Shuichi’s heart was pounding in his chest at he stared at the long dead Mukuro Ikusaba.

The Ultimate Soldier was one of the students involved in the killing game of class 78, and she was the one that he had researched the most. The twin sister of Junko Enoshima, a girl who agreed to help her sister create the ultimate despair that took over the world. A girl who was betrayed by her twin, who made an attempt to take her place only to die very early on in the mutual killing game, impaled for daring to stand up to Monokuma, thinking that she was immune to her sister’s bloodlust.

The girl who had a love affair with his mother, twenty years ago when the apocalypse was going on all around them. The girl who his mother only spoke about every so often but never went into detail because the entire situation was just too painful for her - the girl who his mother didn’t even remember until after the entire killing game was over, after she had realized that their relationship culminated in something bigger, something serious that was going on even before the killing game had ended.

The girl who helped his mother make him.

What was he supposed to do in this situation? Was he supposed to march over to this ghost, who he knew for a fact that nobody else could see - including Kaede, who was still standing  _ right next to him _ , and announce that she was his biological parent? That his mother been pregnant during the killing game, when the two of them couldn’t even remember each other, and that he had been the result of that? Shuichi had wanted to meet his other mother for his entire life - he had always wanted to get to know her.

Just… not like this. Not in the gym of a long abandoned high school, not with his mother as a ghost. He had imagined his entire life what it might have been like to know both his moms, to be raised by both of them. From the way his mother talked about Mukuro Ikusaba, he knew that she had truly loved her, and that was enough for Shuichi. He took a step forward without really thinking about it, moved a little closer to this ghost. He had to try, he had to make an attempt to have a conversation with her even if he had spent his entire life since elementary school trying to ignore his ability to see the undead.

“Shuichi?” he heard Kaede ask behind him, and jumped harshly when he was ripped back to reality and remembered that his best friend was right next to him. He turned his head quickly to look at her, and saw nothing but concern in wide violet eyes. A pang of guilt ran through him, and he looked back to the ghost, seeing that she was now getting to his feet. “What’s wrong? What happened? You’ve been acting weird since the moment we got to the school grounds. I deserve to know if something’s wrong.”

“No, no, I’m okay, Kaede, really,” Shuichi tried to reassure her, putting his hands up as if he was trying to calm her down. “I promise, if something was up I would have told you by now. You know me well enough to know that. We’ve been best friends since before either of us can remember. I trust you, and you trust me, right?” He hoped the smile on his face looked genuine, despite the anxiety running through his entire body at just the concept of lying to his best friend.

Kaede didn’t look like she believed him; he knew her really well, and he knew what it looked like when she was full of anxiety and full of disbelief. A pang of guilt hit him, and internally he was beating himself up for worrying her, even a little. She scrutinized him for several seconds, brows furrowed, before she sighed and relented. “Okay,” she said softly, giving his arm a gentle pat. “I’m going to find Kirumi, ask her if anything was linked to the gym. I remember her saying something about it when we first agreed to come to the school and look around. Is she still in the A/V room?”

After Shuichi nodded in response, Kaede rushed out of the gym in a fashion that would worry the detective if he wasn’t well aware that he himself was keeping some secrets. That was for the best, though. When he first told her that he could see ghosts, when they were in elementary school, she was skeptical; she probably thought it was something he had outgrown. He sighed heavily as she left the gym, before turning around to face Mukuro Ikusaba, who was watching him intently with intelligent stormy grey eyes.

His eyes.

Shuichi swallowed. Maybe having a conversation with her wasn’t a good idea after all.

“You can see me.” It wasn’t a question. Her voice was cold, calm, analyzing as she walked towards him, got uncomfortably close as she studied his facial features carefully. Shuichi couldn’t keep eye contact with anyone he didn’t know well, but it didn’t seem difficult when it came to ghosts - let alone the ghost of his long lost biological mother. “Nobody reacts the way you do when they come into the gym. Nobody has ever been able to see me or anyobody else in the entire time we’ve been here. Who are you? Why can you see me?” Her words were getting more heated. Angrier.

“Calm down,” he demanded quickly, fighting to keep a stutter out of his voice as he put his hands up in a surrendered position. “My name is Shuichi Saihara. I’m a detective who can just happen to see and hear spirits. The girl that was with me can’t see you. Don’t worry, I’m not - I’m not here to cause any trouble.” A spark of recognition crossed over Mukuro’s features when he mentioned his name, that he was a detective, and he could practically hear the pieces clicking together in her mind. “I’m - I’m Kyoko Kirigiri’s son. With you. You’re my mother. I’m - I’m assuming you didn’t know she was pregnant.”

Mukuro shook her head. “I didn’t.” A moment of silence passed, Shuichi figuring that it was probably for the best to let her process that information for a moment. “I - I doubt she could’ve known at the time, either. If - if I even  _ suspected _ that she could have been pregnant, I wouldn’t have cooperated with forcing her into the killing game, I just thought that she could handle herself normally. God, that - that doesn’t excuse this. I’m so sorry, Shuichi. I’m so sorry.” Another pause. “How old are you?”

“Nineteen.” Shuichi let out a shaky sigh, ran a hand through dark hair. “Mom… she always said that she was suspecting that she could be pregnant towards the end of the killing game, and that got her thinking that her memory was tampered with, because… because she’d never had sex before she went to Hope’s Peak, and that was when the whole thing started. But she… she didn’t remember that it must’ve been yours until the Future Foundation… sorry, you don’t know them, they were founded to fight the Ultimate Despair… they helped her and the other survivors get their memories back.”

The soldier nodded, and took a step back from him, putting one hand over her face before she looked back to Shuichi. “I… I wish I could have been a part of your life, Shuichi. But I’m… God, it feels like I’m a traitor for saying this. I’m glad my sister was defeated. That’s the only way the survivors… the only way your mom could’ve gotten out of this, so I’m assuming that happened. I love Junko. I don’t understand why she hated me so much. But I’ve had… twenty years now to think. And I know now that she needed to be stopped, and that the killings were unnecessary. I’m not the villain, Shuichi. I promise.”

“I know you’re not.” The detective’s voice was soft as he smiled at his mother. “My mom never thought of you in that way, and I promise I’ve never thought in you that way, either. Your sister was a good enough manipulator to even convince people she didn’t know to join her in her insane murdering and ending of the world, let alone a sister that loved her so much. It’s okay, Muku-- Mom.”

The ghost let out a weak laugh, and Shuichi couldn’t stop himself from letting a nervous laugh og his own escape. “I did some things that can never be excused. I was a criminal, it doesn’t matter whether I was manipulated into it or not. That’s unacceptable, it’s not okay. But I… I appreciate the sentiment, Shuichi, I really do.” Grey eyes had turned warm and clear, and the detective let out the faintest sigh of relief. He was honestly concerned that his mother would hate him, would assume the worst of him. “So… who was the girl that was with you earlier? What’s her name? Is she a kid of our class?”

Shuichi wiped his eye - he hadn’t even noticed that he was tearing up. He wondered if that was a normal reaction to meeting one of your biological parents and actually getting along with them for the first time. “Her name is Kaede Akamatsu, and she’s been my best friend in the world for as long as I can remember along with my other best friend, Kaito. She’s not exactly the daughter of anyone from your class, but she  _ is _ the kid of Hope’s Peak alumni. Her parents are --”

“Shuichi?”

His shoulders tensed as he heard Kaede’s soft voice behind him, and he turned around slowly, finding her approaching him slowly. Her brows were furrowed, and she was giving him the same look that anyone who caught him talking to ghosts gave him. She looked at him like he was  _ crazy _ , and that cut deeper into him than any wound any could. “Who are you talking to?” she asked, her voice soft and her head tilted. Panic was starting to rise in his chest, no, no, he didn’t want her to know.

His first thought was to lie to her. Tell her that he didn’t know what she was talking about, that he wasn’t talking to anybody - but he knew, logically, that the jig was up. He couldn’t just look her dead in the eyes after she walked in on him having a discussion with his dead mother and tell her that he hadn’t just been talking. No, he needed to be honest. “I…” He swallowed, his mouth dry. “Please,  _ please _ don’t treat me like I’m crazy. I’m not lying to you. I can… I can see ghosts. And hear them. Just like I told you when we were kids. I didn’t grow out of that, it’s always been true.”

She stared at him, her eyes blank, and then started laughing. “Oh, man, Shuichi. You’ve got to stop joking around with me like that.” She clapped her hand against his shoulder, and he winced. “I know you only said that because you wanted attention when we were little, but you don’t need that anymore! You’ve got friends, and…” Her voice faded out when she looked at his face, his hurt expression. “... Oh, my God, you’re being serious. Shuichi, you can’t expect me to believe that.”

“But it’s true. I’ve never lied to you before, you know that.” He took a step back from her, and when she tried to reach for him, he stepped back even further. “I knew you would react this way. I knew you would think I’m insane. I knew you would think I’m just hallucinating. This is why I’ve never told you.” His voice was high, and he could feel tears beginning to well up in his eyes. “I’m not crazy, Kaede.”

“Shuichi--”

He shook his head, and ran past her to get out of the gym before he could start crying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mukuro is a trans woman, kyoko is cis. they dated just before and during the apocalypse. kyoko was about two weeks pregnant with shuichi when the killing game began.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shuichi comes clean to Kaito.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heard you guys ordered some gays

Shuichi wasn’t entirely focused on where he was going. He was upset; he felt like he couldn’t trust his best friend in the world anymore, and that was enough to make him unfocused, just want to move and get away. This was already turning out to be the biggest emotional rollercoaster of a night he had ever been through - he just wanted to go back to the office, tell Kirumi that he was sorry but he couldn’t do much of anything about what was going on. He didn’t want to deal with the ghosts that made Kaede - and everyone else, for that matter - think that he was insane or asking for attention.

He ended up in a classroom on the second floor of the school, sitting down at a desk in the back corner and trying to calm down. Already he was beating himself up for reacting so intensely to something as small as Kaede not believing he could see ghosts, but it was something so big, something that took up so much of his life, something that he couldn’t control, and it stung that one of the people he trusted the most in the world couldn’t be trusted with that secret. He didn’t think she would go to somebody and tell them all about how Shuichi was insane, he needed professional help for something he knew wouldn’t go away - she trusted him to know when something was really wrong.

He had lived through enough hardship in his life that he didn’t want to have mental health troubles carry on for longer than they needed to. A lifelong struggle with anxiety and depression had taught him to open up to somebody - his mother, his friends,  _ anybody _ \- as soon as something got to be bigger than he could handle. Kaede knew that, he had explained that to her. For what it was worth, she would keep his secret, even if she thought that he was hallucinating.

The detective looked up at the clock, watched the second hand tick forward, felt himself get more… well, not calm, but certainly more numb. He didn’t think he was about to cry or have a panic attack any longer, but he wasn’t feeling any better. Shuichi knew that he was going to have to get up and make his way back downstairs, keep investigating… though, by himself now. He preferred to ignore the fact that he was psychic, despite having known it for as long as he could remember, but there was no dodging around it now - what was going on in Hope’s Peak was darker, bigger than just a standard investigation could handle. He needed to try and help the spirits move on.

He didn’t know much about why Kirumi was working in the abandoned school now, but he did know that it had been commissioned by her parents. Makoto Naegi, one of her fathers, had owned the shell of the academy since just before the apocalypse caused by the Ultimate Despair ended. Shuichi knew that the graduating class his mothers and Kirumi’s fathers came from had awful, awful memories involving Hope’s Peak; the killing game they were forced to experience happened there, after all. So if Kirumi was being asked to clean up the school and make sure it was in working condition… there had to be a reason. Makoto had to be planning on restarting the school for new generations.

He had to admit that he didn’t understand why, wasn’t sure if it was a good idea after the original Hope’s Peak went through so much corruption in the time it had been around, right down to human experimentation and just using the student body to study talent. Still, he had faith in the man that his mother had always been so close to. So he wasn’t going to ask too many questions about that. He just knew that if the academy would ever teach anyone again, it would need to be cleansed of the negative energy surrounding it. The ghosts would need to either be placated or gotten rid of entirely, as much as he felt bad for wanting to kick them out of the place they had called home for two decades. He just needed to figure out how an exorcist could be hired to get rid of the ghosts in the school…

The thoughts running through his head had gotten so loud and had taken over his attention so thoroughly that he didn’t notice that the door to the classroom he was sitting in had opened and familiar heavy footsteps had approached until a hand was placed on his shoulder and a familiar voice spoke his name. Shuichi jumped ever so slightly, tensed and turned his head to look up at Kaito. He had never seen the future astronaut look more worried than he had in that moment, brows furrowed and a small frown on his face. “Are you okay, sidekick?” he asked, voice a little quieter and softer than usual.

“I’m fine,” he responded, a little bit too aware of how thick and hoarse his voice sounded as Kaito rubbed one of his shoulders with one hand. Shuichi felt his face heat up rather quickly, although he beat that down mentally with a stick before it could get all that far. “I’m just… I got into a little disagreement with Kaede, I guess. It was nothing too serious, I overreacted, I should probably… probably apologize to her about it.” He let out a shaky sigh, wiped his cheek with the back of her hand.

“What was it about?” Kaito asked, letting go of Shuichi’s shoulder in order to sit down at the desk next to him. The future astronaut hadn’t always been so willing to sit down and talk about feelings and emotions, but over the years he had learned that communication was important. It was what was most important for astronauts, and it was also something that was important when it came to personal relationships with other people, as many an insensitive remark to Maki about her childhood or Shuichi about his anxiety and depression had led him to learn. 

“I told her something that I’ve been trying to keep a secret from her for a long time. From everyone. Kaede… didn’t believe me about it.” He let out a heavy sigh, rested his chin on the table. It felt silly, to be having a conversation about his feelings at a time like this, but he wouldn’t deny that it felt good… and that he needed to get this out to somebody, explain how he was feeling so he wouldn’t be weighed down by angst for the rest of the night while he tried to investigate ghosts.

Still, he wasn’t sure whether or not it was a good idea to bring up the existence of ghosts in the school to Kaito. He had always had an almost unreasonable fear of ghosts, anything supernatural or occult, really - they tried to have a movie night once with their entire group of sixteen friends, tried to watch  _ Poltergeist _ together, but Kaito had ended up looking pale and running out of the living room after no more than twenty minutes. Nothing scary had even happened yet, and he fled - Shuichi honestly had found it funny at the time, but it was enough to make him think that…

That Kaito would hate him, never want anything to do with him again, if he found out that he attracted and could see ghosts. Even if he never wanted to had anything to do with them, they knew he could see them. They followed him wherever he went. They were always so distracting, always so ready to talk his ear off and wait until he eventually slipped up and said something back and then everyone looked at him like he was insane, talking to somebody they couldn’t see, even  _ Kaede _ …

“Shuichi.” He jumped slightly when he heard Kaito’s voice again, saw the future astronaut waving a hand in front of his face and forcing him back into reality. “Come on, you can tell me anything. What’s the secret you’ve tried to keep?” Deep purple eyes were so caring, so ready to accept whatever it was that Shuichi had to say, and it made the detective’s heart lurch in his chest. Of course he couldn’t just go without telling Kaito anything. He didn’t just let things go, that wasn’t something the Luminary of the Stars had ever been any good at. Shuichi was almost frustrated.

“To tell you the truth, Kaito, I…” He paused. Took a deep breath in his nose, let it out through his mouth. “I can see ghosts. I understand if you don’t believe me, because Kaede sure didn’t, and I… I understand if you don’t want to be anywhere near me, too, because I know how you feel about ghosts and the occult and everything.” He ran one thin, shaking hand through his hair, hunched over the desk ever so slightly and let out a long, shaky sigh. “I’m sorry, Kaito.”

“Sorry? What the hell are you sorry for?” Kaito asked as he leapt to his feet, voice suddenly boisterous and encouraging again. Shuichi could see when the other man was going into a “motivational speaker” mode, and it was a little bit comforting to know that his friend wasn’t turning on him. “I won’t  _ lie _ to you, I am scared of ghosts, and it scares me to know that you can see them, but that doesn’t mean you’re any less my friend. It’s not like it’s something you chose or you can control. It’s a part of you. And I…” Unless his imagination was playing tricks on him, Kaito’s face got a little read. “I care about you. You’re my sidekick. My best friend. That’s what matters to me.”

A shaky sigh left Shuichi, and he couldn’t help but get up to his feet as he walked quickly over to Kaito and wrapped his arms tightly around the taller man. Shuichi didn’t cry, but his breathing was a little shaky, heart pounding in his chest but relief,  _ relief _ completely taking over his entire body. He was so happy that his other best friend believed him, accepted him no matter what. One strong hand rubbed his upper back soothingly, helped him calm down the rest of the way from his earlier panic.

“Thank you,” he murmured, voice a little shaky as he looked up at Kaito and pulled himself away. Shuichi let out a shaky sigh, gave his friend a small smile. “I should probably go apologize to Kaede for overreacting, and for scaring her. I… I think I’ll probably tell her that everything I said was just a joke like she was assuming, at least keep her from thinking I’m crazy even if it’s probably proven wrong immediately by how I reacted.” He let out a heavy sigh, and turned around to leave the classroom.

Before he could take more than one step, though, he was interrupted by the door crashing open and none other than Kokichi Ouma appearing in the doorway. Kaito let out a rather undignified shriek behind him and wrapped his arms tightly around Shuichi’s middle. The detective was more startled by the sudden physical contact than he was by the appearance of Kokichi, but the little gremlin got right started teasing anyway. “Wooooow, Momo-chan, I knew I was absolutely  _ terrifying, _ but I didn’t think you’d have that kind of reaction to seeing me! I’m almost hurt!”

Kaito looked like he was about to argue with Kokichi, but before he could, the significantly calmer Rantaro stepped into the doorway, leaning casually against his much smaller boyfriend in an almost comedic way. “We’re not here to bother Kaito, actually, we’re here to tell Shuichi something.” His voice was relaxed, almost too chill for what came out of his mouth next. “We noticed something. Down where all of the executions happened back when the school was used for the killing game.”

“What kind of something?” Shuichi asked as he approached the two, the expression on his face a thoughtful one. “It’s okay if it’s… a ghost. You can tell me about it, Kaito knows. I just told him.” Neither Rantaro nor Kokichi was shy about their own psychic abilities, although they were significantly less powerful than Shuichi’s. They didn’t share the same anxiety he did; they had just long accepted it as a part of themselves that couldn’t be removed. If the detective was being honest, he envied them for it. He wished he could be confident in his ability to see spirits. He wished he could use it correctly.

Rantaro nodded slowly, and opened his mouth to speak before Kokichi blurted out the answer. “Leon Kuwata! He’s downstairs and said that everyone that died during the killing game ended up haunting the school. We think you should go talk to him.”

Shuichi nodded, instructed Kaito quickly to stay where he was and quickly walked past Kokichi and Rantaro in order to make his way to the basement.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yup, kirumi and rantaro's parents are makoto and byakuya! since kaito is their half-sibling you can probably at least figure out who one of his parents is.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shuichi talks to Leon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IT'S 12:41PM I PUSHED THIS WHOLE THING OUT BECAUSE I COULDN'T STOP IM SO FUCKING TIRED FORGIVE ANY REPETITIVENESS

Shuichi felt a little weird, standing next to Kaito as he faced the ghost of Leon Kuwata. The boy before him was clear as day, skin tinted a faint deathly blue, red hair just as carefully styled and eyeliner just as painstakingly applied as it had been in life. The deep, deep sadness behind the former baseball star’s expression, though, was painfully apparent; the detective supposed it must have been a combination of the weight taking another human life left on a soul and the fact that he had been trapped in the school where he died for the last two decades. Part of him wondered if the ghost knew that he was looking at his son, wondered if he could see any of himself in Kaito’s face or his expression.

The detective couldn’t help but spare a sideways glance in his friend’s direction. Kaito clearly didn’t know that anything was going on, and was watching Shuichi with brows furrowed and confusion in indigo eyes. He let out a soft sigh, clenched and unclenched his fists, prayed that once the other man saw him talking to someone that wasn’t even there in his eyes he wouldn’t think he was strange and would just turn on his heel and walk away. He had to have faith that Kaito would still think of him as Shuichi Saihara, his loyal sidekick, one of his best friends. He had to trust him.

Feeling a little weird about the whole thing, Shuichi took a step towards Leon Kuwata. He had to pretend that there was nobody else here; not even Rantaro or Kokichi, who he knew full well could see the dead baseball star clearly. “I’m Shuichi Saihara,” he introduced himself slowly, watching the ghost the entire time he talked and analyzed the situation, faded golden eyes careful and intelligent. “I’m… here to help. Or at least request of you spirits to stop making so much trouble around the school. It’s making it next to impossible for my friend to do her job and clean up the school.”

A reaction he hadn’t been expecting was a sharp laugh, and Shuichi couldn’t help but flinch back a little. “I don’t give a flying fuck about your friend’s job. I  _ died _ here. I was murdered by a madwoman who locked me and my friends away, took our memories of why we were here and let us be consumed by panic and fear.” A short pause. “I want to rest, Shuichi Saihara, and I’m pretty sure everyone else that’s still stuck in the school does too. If you can get rid of us, if you can let us go to sleep, we’ll let your friend do her damn job because we won’t be around to interfere anymore.”

He supposed he could understand that. Shuichi had felt mentally and emotionally drained enough times in his life to understand what it was like to just want to rest. To want to stop existing. By all means, Leon Kuwata, Mukuro Ikusaba, and everyone else that had died in the walls of Hope’s Peak Academy deserved the chance to sleep, for all eternity if they needed to. They died twenty years earlier; they should have gone to sleep so long ago, and it wasn’t fair that they were stuck here.

It wasn’t their fault that they died, that they were forced into an impossible, unwinnable situation. It wasn’t their fault that their lives were chosen to be sacrificed as an example to the rest of the world. It wasn’t their fault that some of them had to go their entire lives without getting to know their children - Shuichi wondered what life would have been like if he got to grow up with Mukuro, if Kaito got to grow up with Leon. Sadness enveloped his chest, his entire being, and it wasn’t just his own.

Leon was looking at Kaito. He must have figured that out. Shuichi looked over at the future astronaut, and then back at the dead athlete before he let out a heavy sigh and pushed his bangs out of his face. “This is Kaito Momota. He can’t see you.” His voice was calm; it had to be, for the moment anyway. “Yes, he’s your son. You can probably tell. He was born about seven months after the killing game. He’s been my friend for as long as I can remember.” It crossed his mind for a moment that he might have to be the middleman in a father son reunion, and he couldn’t help but cringe.

He was a little surprised when Kaito leaned over a little closer to him to mutter in his ear. “Are you talking to a ghost right now?” he asked, and Shuichi couldn’t hold back a small laugh at the question. It wasn’t the question with the most obvious answer Kaito had ever asked him, but he couldn’t help but be astonished anyway; the late (or early) hour and how much he had been through over the course of the day was starting to make it hard to not laugh at much of anything.

“Yeah, I’m talking to Leon Kuwata right now,” Shuichi replied, giving the other man a small smile before he looked back to the ghost. “I promise to find a way to get you out of the school,” he addressed Leon again then, smiling gently at the dead athlete and hoping he sounded more confident in his words than he actually was. He had absolutely no idea how he was supposed to exorcise a spirit, but he was determined that he would find a way. If there was one thing he could do, it was research and solve a mystery; and if there was a way, he would find it.

The athlete stayed silent for several moments, watching Shuichi and Kaito carefully before he nodded slowly, hands going to rest on his hips. “Okay, I’ll trust you, but only because I don’t have much of any other choice. And not much of anything to lose.” He sighed heavily, before stepping back. It took a moment for Shuichi to notice it, but he was starting to fade, grow translucent. The detective’s brows furrowed with confusion, so the baseball star explained quickly. “It’s sunrise.”

It hit Shuichi rather suddenly that there wasn’t much of anything he could do at this point. He could tell from Kirumi’s explanations that the paranormal activity around the school went away around sunrise, so he supposed this was one of the stereotypical hauntings where the activity left once the sun went up. He let out a heavy sigh; he wondered if he would be able to come back and finish the job, carry through on the promise that he had already made. He had to - he had to.

Shuichi was slow in walking back to the elevator, leaning against the wall of the device as it tugged the four of them upwards. He was sure he hadn’t felt this fatigued in a long time; he felt like his entire body was going to fall apart if he spent one more moment on his feet, but he knew that he had to in order to get much of anything done. He would just have to force it, fool his body into thinking it wasn’t tired and sore and about to force him down to the floor at any given moment.

It didn’t take him long to run into exactly who he was looking for; Kirumi was also on her way out, head held high but the expression on her face just as exhausted as his own. Shuichi was confused for a moment; he was pretty sure the maid just slept in whatever building her job required her to be in. Maybe she was so tired of the constant bumps in the night, the frequent panic that somebody was in the building, and she needed to go somewhere where she could actually rest.

Maybe she felt let down by his investigation because he couldn’t get to her with anything actually concrete by the end of the night. His heart lurched in his chest, and he quickly walked to catch up with her, calling out her name quickly in order to make her stop and turn around to face him as he approached. “I think I might know what’s going on in the school,” he told her, chest heaving slightly with increasing exhaustion. All he wanted to do was get back to his apartment and  _ sleep. _ “It’s a little hard to believe, but I’m going to need you to give me the benefit of the doubt. I know it’s something Rantaro is experienced with, so I… I’m pretty sure you’ll believe me, but I… am a little worried.”

Kirumi blinked at him slowly, and Shuichi felt pity in his chest when he saw the dark circles under her eyes and the exhaustion keeping her face from lifting. “I’m willing to believe anything you have to tell me at this point, Shuichi,” she responded, voice sounding so aged - even past her usual maturity. “I’m tired of trying to find an obvious explanation for everything that happens in this school. Just tell me what you think. Please.”

He couldn’t say that he blamed her for her exhaustion, or for just wanting an answer no matter how much sense it made. “I think that there are ghosts in the school - no, I know it. I’ve spoken to the spirits of both Mukuro Ikusaba and Leon Kuwata. If you don’t believe me, double check with Kokichi and Rantaro, they both saw them, they can back me up.” He was hardly aware that his voice sounded a little hysterical, a little frantic. He was tired, his mind was barely working, and he just wanted to help. He wanted to help Kirumi, who was stuck working in a haunted school, and he wanted to help the spirits who had been stuck in restless misery for the last twenty years.

“I believe you.” Her voice was quick, quicker than Shuichi had been expecting for her to accept an explanation of such a nature. “I’m a skeptic when it comes to things like this, but my brother has been seeing ghosts his entire life, and I just… don’t see any other way this could all be happening. You fainted the second you stepped into the basement, Kaede told me you were talking to someone that wasn’t there…” She shook her head. “Is there… anything we can do to at least get them to calm down?”

“I actually had that discussion with Leon Kuwata. He said that everybody wants to be exorcised and get the chance to finally rest. I can relate.” He wasn’t sure where that last sentence came from, but he supposed that it must have come from the part of his mind that had no operating brain cells left. “I’m going to find a way to do that, or at least try to, but… Kirumi, I need to ask, why are you working so hard to try and clean up this school? It almost doesn’t seem to be worth the effort. I’m not saying you should abandon your job or anything, but I’m just… curious, I guess.”

Kirumi sighed, her shoulders dropping a little. “I wasn’t supposed to say anything about this, so don’t tell my fathers I told you. But they want to reopen Hope’s Peak Academy, run it a little differently so that nothing like last time happened.” There was desperation in deep green eyes when she looked back up at Shuichi once more, and a flash of pity ran through the detective for a moment.

He nodded, let out a sigh. “Yeah. Okay. I understand that.” A small pause. “Would you be okay with us coming back to the school every night until all the ghosts have been exorcised? I think coming back frequently would be the best and most efficient way to solve the issue.”

“Shuichi, I would do anything at this point.” She hesitated, and then moved forward to wrap her arms around the detective. “Thank you,” she spoke, her voice quiet and tired, and Shuichi realized at that moment that there was no way he could back away now.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shuichi, Rantaro, and Kiibo visit the library, and Shuichi gets a visit from a certain anthropologist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> korekiyo's one true love is anthropology

The public library had once been one of Shuichi’s favorite places to be; when his mother was busy working on a case or with the Future Foundation and all of their family friends were either busy or still living with on Jabberwock Island, he and Kaede and Kaito would be dropped off at the library under the supervision of the kind librarians and with the books and various toys that were around for the kids. It brought back memories of days spent playing with the puppet theater in the corner of the kids’ section or reading stories far too old for his age because he had already gone through everything age appropriate.

It was at the library that he had actually learned, for the first time, that the people he spoke to that his mother or friends didn’t see weren’t real people that they just didn’t want him talking to. He was about six years old at the time, sitting down for another long day with Kaede and looking through mystery books before he found one he had never read before - one about ghosts. It was while they were reading together that he finally put two and two together and realized that the people he saw that his mother didn’t weren’t alive - they were the dead come back to haunt the living. Kaito had listened in on him reading the story aloud, and there was a part of Shuichi that wondered if the lifelong fear of the occult was his fault.

He had stepped into the library many times since beginning work as a detective, but the quiet and calm atmosphere was enough to make him feel better about whatever horrific matters he was reading. However, he never once considered that he would be here reading about ghosts again. He decided when he was eleven years old that he was leaving behind these psychic abilities, these dead people that walked among the living, and for the last eight years he had been good at keeping it that way.

Now, though? Now he had to face this part of him that he had tried to push down his entire life. He had to make sure that he helped Kirumi, helped the students trapped in Hope’s Peak. So it was with a heavy sigh that he got to his feet for the seventh time that afternoon to bring a book back and bring another to the table where he sat with Rantaro and Kiibo. This one was a heavy and thick book that smelled heavily of dust, was starting to yellow around the edges, and contained records on various exorcisms that had been carried out throughout history. Maybe this one would supply better information?

Shuichi let the book fall open as he sat in the chair across from Rantaro, and began thumbing through the pages of the tome. It took all of twenty minutes for Shuichi to get frustrated and decide that he was done and that this entire operation was doomed to fail. With a groan, he shut the book with more force than he usually did and leaned back in the chair he sat in with his hands over his face.

“Every single case of an exorcism that’s been recorded has involved a priest,” Shuichi complained, his tone defeated and tired. “I told Kirumi I would help her and exorcise all the spirits from Hope’s Peak, but I’m not religious and I don’t plan on being converted just to help with a case, that’s three years of studying and I don’t have that much time.” His words were all coming out in a blur now. He was frustrated and well aware that he looked like he was going to cry.

“Hey, I don’t think being ordained is a requirement for doing an exorcism, especially when it doesn’t have anything to do with demons. It’s just a bunch of ghosts that want to move into the next world more than you want them gone.” Rantaro’s voice was as calm and unaffected as ever, and Shuicih wasn’t sure if it was comforting or infuriating. It could be either, if he was being honest. “Maybe we’re just not looking in the right place. Are there any books you haven’t looked at yet?”

“Not any that didn’t have big crosses on the binding or a fiction label.” Shuichi rested his head in his hands and closed his eyes, letting out a heavy sigh and feeling a dull ache beginning to form in his head. He was completely exhausted. Maybe he should have spent more time sleeping during the day than looking through books that weren’t getting him anywhere; he thought about how he would need to stay up all night and work his way through Hope’s Peak again, and let out a long, suffering groan. Maybe he would try and take another nap before he had to make his way to the academy again… “I would look on the Internet because people think you can find anything on the Internet, but anyone can put anything they want on there. Nothing I find on some website is going to work and get those spirits out.

“I think you should try doing the methods that are shown in the books - the non religious ones, I mean. Like comforting the spirit and helping them move on,” Kiibo spoke up for the first time since the three of them sat down to try and work on research. He had stayed quiet for the most part, and Shuichi just assumed that he was doing research of his own, using the access to all sorts of information being an artificial intelligence granted him. It looked like he was right, too, because the robot slid a notebook across the table to him; Shuichi took a glance and saw various notes about using emotional and psychic energy to help a spirit move on. “I was able to locate a database created by psychic people and for psychic people, and I assumed that because you can see spirits, you’re psychic. I apologize if that’s incorrect.”

He blinked. “Yeah, I guess that’s right. I’ve never really thought about it.” Shuichi reached his hand out to pull the notebook closer to him. He glanced over the notes, furrowed his brows and thought about the instructions given to them. Use their emotions to urge them to move on, and if they either couldn’t do that or were too angry to even consider it, he would use psychic energy to try and push them in that direction. The problem was, he had absolutely no idea how he was supposed to do that. Maybe it was a bad thing that he spent so many years of his life trying to force his abilities down after all.

“Maybe Himiko would know something about it? Or Korekiyo, maybe. They both have some experience in psychic energy or whatever.” Rantaro’s suggestion came easily, and for a moment Shuichi paled at the idea of telling anybody else about his abilities. If there were any two people who would believe him, they would be Himiko the self proclaimed mage and Korekiyo the expert on humans and their stories, but he still had severe anxiety about it - especially after Kaede’s reaction when he told her. Even if Kaito had believed him, the other of his best friends thinking he was crazy… was a bit of a hit.

“I don’t want to call either of them into this unless it’s really needed,” Shuichi replied, straightening from where he was slumped against the back of the chair. 

“Okay, but it must be needed right now if you can’t figure out what to do.” Kiibo was firm as he pulled out his cell phone. “I’m going to text Kiyo and ask him to stop by your office today.” It seemed like he didn’t have much of a choice in the matter, and Shuichi couldn’t help but groan. It wasn’t that he disliked the anthropologist, but… Korekiyo could be a bit much sometimes, and he didn’t want to make this entire situation more public or troublesome than it needed to be.

Shuichi got to his feet after a couple more minutes of trying to find another solution, and decided that he needed to get back to his office so that he would be there when Korekiyo arrived. Kiibo decided to walk with him, saying that he might as well meet up with his brother when the detective met up with him. The library wasn’t very far from the building where his office and apartment were, so the two of them walked together, talking about the case of Hope’s Peak and then about a Sherlock Holmes movie.

They reached the office after about fifteen minutes of walking, and Shuichi unlocked the door, expecting to return to a dark and empty office considering it was closed for the day. One of those two things was certainly true, but the detective let out a rather embarrassing startled noise when he stepped inside and saw the tall silhouette of a person in the darkened room. Shuichi instinctively smacked the light switch by the door, and his panic wasn’t lessened very much when he saw the one and only Korekiyo Shinguji standing in his office, looking through one of the case files he kept in his desk.

“Don’t look at those, they’re confidential,” he quickly spoke as he rushed over to Korekiyo and took the file from his bandaged hand before putting it back in the desk where it belonged. “How did you get inside? The door was locked, and Kaede and Kaito haven’t been here today so they couldn’t have let you in.” He wasn’t very happy, that was for sure; like his privacy and the privacy of his clients had been invaded and definitely like he was regretting agreeing to talk to the anthropologist.

Did he even agree to this? He couldn’t remember telling Kiibo that he was okay with this meeting, but he hadn’t seen much of any other choice so he hadn’t said no either. “I apologize,” Korekiyo spoke, and though Shuichi couldn’t see his mouth he could tell from the way his upper face changed that he was smiling. “I simply got curious while I was waiting for you to get back. As for how I got in, well, that’s a story for when you’re ready to learn it.”

What did that even mean? Shuichi felt a bead of sweat fall down his forehead, but he decided not to question it. Korekiyo said a lot of cryptic things that could barely be understood by anyone, and it wouldn’t get the detective much of anywhere to try and find answers about what he was saying. “Okay, okay, nevermind about how you got into the office. I’m sure Kiibo told you a bit about why I needed to see you?” Did he even need to see him? “We’re investigating Hope’s Peak, and we found out that a lot of the disturbances are caused by ghosts that are still stuck there from the first killing game. We - I - need to learn more about how to use psychic energy to exorcise spirits.”

Korekiyo’s golden eyes lit up like the Fourth of July, and he perked up rather quickly, moving forward in order to take Shuichi’s hands in his own. The detective’s first instinct was to pull back, but he chose not to, instead listening to the anthropologist ramble on about humanity’s beauty and how he understood why some people wouldn’t want to leave this world behind but they made themselves so troublesome to the living people that they must be removed.

Shuichi could barely track the rest of the conversation and had a hard time understanding the words that Korekiyo spoke about exorcising spirits, but he thought he got the jist of it. He would need to focus all of his energy that he could, visualize the ghost leaving the school…

He was so wrapped up in his thoughts that he didn’t even notice Korekiyo and Kiibo both bid him farewell and left the building. 


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shuichi and Kaede make up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey would you look at that kokichi did something positive for once

He stumbled upstairs to his apartment with a heavy yawn, unlocked the door a little clumsily and slumped against the door as he rubbed his eyes. Shuichi was completely exhausted, and thought that he deserved a nap for a little while before he made his way back to Hope’s Peak. Oh god. Even thinking about it was enough to make the detective even more tired, and he decided that he was better off just moving back to his bed and collapsing to get some sleep. He shrugged off his jacket, tossed it back onto his desk chair and crawled under the covers. He curled up in a ball, and was asleep quickly.

He was hoping to get at least six hours of sleep, get himself a good amount of rest before he needed to do the most draining job he had ever worked, but it was only three hours before loud knocking at the door woke him up. He shifted slightly under the covers, turned over and was about to fall back asleep before he heard a second, louder series of knocks. Shuichi groaned, pulled himself up slightly on his elbows as the knocking continued. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” he called out, his voice slurred and sleepy as he rolled onto his feet and walked with stumbling steps to the front door of his apartment.

The detective opened his eyes, blinked the sleep out of his eyes as he looked at a very worried looking Kaede Akamatsu. The pianist didn’t even wait for him to greet her before she shouldered past him and into the apartment. Sleepy and confused, Shuichi turned around to watch Kaede make her way over to one of the chairs in the kitchen and plopped into a sitting position. “Okay, admittedly, my reaction last night was kind of shitty. I’m really sorry. I should have said something a little gentler.”

He was a little confused for several moments, just staring at Kaede as he tried to remember what she was apologizing for. As soon as his last few brain cells had clicked into place, his heart dropped and his mouth went dry. She thought he was a freak, she thought he needed to be locked away. He stepped away, let out a long sigh. His first instinct was to say that it was okay, that she really didn’t do anything wrong, but the immense and heavy pain in his chest told him otherwise. He wasn’t entirely sure why he was even taking all of this so hard; his psychic abilities were just something he couldn’t control. Something that he would never be able to control. And his best friend who he trusted most in the world didn’t believe him when he tried to tell her about it.

“I accept your apology.” Maybe her coming by to say she was sorry meant that she believed him now? He perked up ever so slightly, the faintest of smiles crossing over his face. “So, I was doing research earlier today on how to get the spirits out of the school, and it requires a lot of energy, so--”

“Shuichi, stop,” Kaede cut him off, put one hand up so that he would cease his rambling, and the detective stopped talking almost immediately. He barely noticed that his eyes had widened, his heart rate picked up. “Look, I’m not going to say that I believe you about ghosts being real, because I don’t, but I also don’t… don’t believe you?” He wasn’t sure if he was more confused or hurt at first, but he didn’t have time to think about it before his friend started talking again. “Okay. I believe you see ghosts, but I don’t believe they’re real. I think you’ve been hallucinating.”

She reached behind hr into her backpack, pulled out a folder and put a piece of paper on the table. Shuichi glanced over at it - a printed out list of mental illnesses that caused hallucinations. He swallowed. Admittedly, maybe he would have believed her out of desperation if he hadn’t already committed himself to a paranormal struggle that couldn’t be brushed off. Maybe he would have gone through with anything that he thought even briefly would make the constant crying and moaning spirits go away. Even if he’d known they were real since Rantaro admitted he could sense them, he would’ve tried.

He couldn’t now. She was too late in finding out, and she was too late in trying to get Shuichi help for a disorder that didn’t exist. He didn’t know if he should argue with her, so he didn’t speak for the moment - not until Kaede spoke again, anyway, pulling another paper out of the folder. He shifted his hand, and caught a glimpse of his name scrawled on the front of the folder with permanent marker. “I’ve been thinking about it, and since the disorder has gone untreated and undiagnosed for so long putting you in a mental institution might be for the best. It might not be necessary, though, but it’s a big possibility, so we can start by getting you to a doctor so they can see the situation for themselves and actually get a plan for your recovery, since they would know about this better than me…”

“No.” Shuichi spoke more firmly than he ever had in his life as he put his hand on the papers and pushed them back across the table to Kaede. “I’m not crazy, and I’m not hallucinating. I understand why you would think I am, but I’m not.” He let out a shaky sigh. “Look, I’ve already committed myself to fixing this problem for Kirumi and for the future of Hope’s Peak. I promise to go see a doctor after all of this is over if you really think it’s for the best, but for now I can’t.”

“Solving mysteries and doing your job isn’t going to matter if you’re not taking care of yourself and making sure you’re not hallucinating the whole thing!” Kaede moved forward with a quickness that Shuichi would have thought unnatural if this wasn’t his extremely energetic and extremely worried best friend. “Shuichi, please, I know that you want to help, but it isn’t real. The ghosts aren’t real.”

“They are real, and they’re wreaking havoc in the school,” Shuichi’s voice came out in a snap as he ripped his hands away from his best friend, crossing his arms over his chest as he hugged himself. “Come on, you’ve given me the benefit of the doubt in everything else, why can’t you do it for something as important as this? I’ve been desperate to get rid of the ghosts I see since I was little. I’ve looked for solutions to get rid of them for years. If I thought they were just hallucinations, I would’ve done it years ago, okay? I hate this ability, I hate being able to see dead people, I hate hearing them all the time-”

“Bad time?”

The detective tensed, and turned on his heel, golden eyes wide and shoulders jumping up to his ears as his sight settled on the one and only Kokichi Ouma leaning against the door to his apartment. His first instinct was to ask how the hell he got into his home, but he supposed he wasn’t entirely sure if he or Kaede closed the door behind her when she forced her way in.

Well, at least somebody was here now that actually believed in his psychic abilities, even if he didn’t trust Kokichi to go on Kaede’s side as some kind of joke. Still, Shuichi sighed heavily and gestured into the apartment. “No, come on in,” he responded, his voice dry and tired as Kokichi did exactly that, practically skipping into the apartment before sitting himself down at one of the free chairs at the table. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small packet, putting it down on the table.

“So, I snuck a few pictures while we were in the school yesterday and I got them printed out today. They’ve got some interesting stuff in them, which I think Kaede would be especially interested in seeing!” He sounded downright giddy as he wiggled in his seat. Shuichi squinted at him, a little suspicious as he opened the envelope and pulled out the small selection of photographs captured by Kokichi. He furrowed his brows as he went through a few of them, relatively uninteresting, just spooky shots of the outside of the school and a couple from in the hallways.

Uninteresting, that is, until he reached a shot of Shuichi and Rantaro walking down the hallway while Kokichi trailed behind them. The fuzzy and dark apparition of a human was just behind them, and if the detective squinted and held the photograph a little closer to his face, he could make out the features of Mukuro Ikusaba walking with them. Astonished that such an image had been captured, he flipped through a couple more of the same hallway and the same people, one of them with the ghost of Mukuro glancing over her shoulder at Kokichi and his camera. Her face was clear and easy to make out, right down to the freckles scattered across her nose and her cheeks.

He passed those images over to Kaede, and heard her breath catch as she looked through them. Shuichi continued going through the newer photographs - these showed very clearly his conversation with Leon Kuwata, who was even easier to make out than Mukuro, almost looking like a real person instead of the dark and fuzzy blur of his mother. He couldn’t help the relief washing over him; maybe Kaede would finally believe him now that there was photographic evidence of exactly what he was talking about.

“Wow,” Kaede breathed out at first, slowly put down the pile of pictures and closing her eyes for a moment. Shuichi could almost hear the gears in her mind turning, before the pianist let out a little laugh - it sounded so much more nervous than her usual giddy giggles, though. “These are some really good edits, Kokichi. Are you two in on a joke or something? This seems like a lot of effort just to freak me out a little! I guess it’s a good thing that Shuichi isn’t really hallucinating, though!”

“Not a joke this time, my dear Kayayday!” Kokichi’s mispronunciation of Kaede’s name was clearly intentional, and he quickly produced a digital camera from his scarf. Shuichi was barely able to wonder where the small supreme leader got it from before it was handed over to the pianist. “You can look it over, this still has the pictures I took when we were at Hope’s Peak, and there’s no editing function. All of it is timestamped, all you need to do is have a looksie!”

Kaede blinked, but did as she was told, turning on the camera and opening up the gallery to look through the pictures. Shuichi watched her face pale by a couple of shades before she quickly handed the camera back to a very smug looking Kokichi. “Okay.” She exhaled shakily and straightened her vest, had her eyes closed for a couple of moments. The smile that appeared on her face was one more shaky than usual, but it held as much energy and enthusiasm as usual, and that was enough to soothe the detective at least a little. “I admit, this is… kind of hard to wrap my head around. But I’ll… give you the benefit of the doubt for now. I don’t know if I can completely believe you about ghosts existing, but I know that I can’t completely shrug it off as nothing, either. I’ll continue this with an open mind.”

“You’ll continue this?” Shuichi echoed, surprised and with a rising mood as his best friend made it clear that she wasn’t abandoning him in a difficult situation. She would stick by him, even if what he told her didn’t make sense to her. Even if she didn’t even completely believe him.

Shuichi couldn’t stop himself from walking forward quickly and hugging his best friend tightly.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kaede questions Shuichi.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this fic is now 1/3 of the way done they grow up so fast

“So, you’ve been seeing ghosts, like, all your life?” Kaede asked, leaning towards Shuichi. They had opted to move downstairs to the main office, so that Kokichi could record and file the photographs he’d taken and Shuichi would hopefully be able to get some more work done in his actual work environment. He had resorted to scrolling through online forums, trying to find a thing or two just by reading what other people with supposed psychic abilities wrote. For a time, Kaede was able to stand in the background like he asked her to, although the psychic could tell from occasionally glancing up at her that she was struggling to keep to herself and just wanted to interrogate him. It was only a matter of time before she would inevitably crack, so he wasn’t too annoyed as he minimized the tab he had open.

“For as long as I can remember, yeah.” He leaned back in his desk chair, ran one hand through his hair and let out a sigh. Shuichi never thought that he would speak openly to Kaede about his abilities; the only two people he’d opened up to about them were Kokichi and Rantaro, who were both psychics as well and could both relate at least a little to what he was saying. “I’m surprised you never noticed, honestly. I know I’ve screwed up at least a couple of times and talked to ghosts at crime scenes.”

“I always thought you were just encouraging yourself in your own weird Shuichi way! Investigating murders makes the best of us act a little crazy!” She almost sounded too cheerful as she shifted in her seat, almost seeming to be wiggling. Shuichi had no idea why she was so excited now about something she had been brushing off as mental illness just a couple of hours before. “I guess I might have noticed something was weird sometimes, but we’ve been friends for so long that it all just blended together or something. I remember when you told me when we were little that you thought you could see ghosts, but you never really said anything more about it.” A small pause. “... Why is that?”

For a brief moment, the detective thought about being seven years old. Thought about a mass of black, red eyes staring down at him as he sat in his bed. The outline of pigtails, sharp teeth breaking into a wide, threatening grin. His heart skipped a beat and his blood ran cold, and he tried to swallow the lump that formed in his throat. Shuichi had been haunted by the same figure, the same grin, for two years of his life, until he yelled in a frustration that he would never,  _ never _ use his abilities again. And he had tried not to. He had done his best to ignore the dead people that spoke to him, he had only responded if they rambled and bothered him enough that he just couldn’t concentrate and needed to shut them up if he wanted to get any investigating done. His body tensed, but he tried not to make it obvious.

“I don’t know, I just caught on that it wasn’t normal and didn’t want you or Kaito going and telling people that I was talking about speaking to people that weren’t there for you. You know the conclusion you immediately jumped to.” Shuichi let out a weak laugh, tried to play off his anxiety as he went back to his research and notes. That would keep his mind and his hands occupied enough to not think about it for at least a little bit. “Honestly, Kaede, it’s not something that’s been that big a deal to me until the Hope’s Peak case started up. I’ve tried to pretend they don’t exist. Letting it leak that I can see ghosts and sense things might make me look a little less credible to skeptics.”

If he looked up, he might have noticed the look of guilt that passed over Kaede’s face. As it stood, though, he wasn’t paying an awful lot of attention to his best friend at the moment. “Do you know why you ended up being psychic?” Kaede asked, straightening up from her leaning position and tilting her head. “I mean, there should be a reason you have that ability and nobody else does.”

Shuichi shrugged. “I don’t know. I started trying to look into it five or six years ago, and I theorized at first that it was because my mom was stuck in the killing game and was surrounded by so much death. But Kokichi and Rantaro also have this ability without the correlation. Kokichi is adopted, so we don’t really know what the conditions behind his genetics are, but Rantaro was born in a time of relative peace. Not to mention Kaito’s dad was also pregnant with him during the killing game and he wasn’t born with anything like what I have.” He sighed. “I guess it’s just a random chance thing.”

His best friend pouted, and Kaede folded her arms over her chest. “Even the Ultimate Detective can’t figure out a cause?” she asked, and Shuichi’s first instinct was to tell his friend that he wasn’t anything like that, but before he could even get a word out Kaede was talking again. “Well, lots of people have claimed to be psychic besides Rantaro and Kokichi. I bet you can find some sort of similarity to you in a bigger group of people, right?”

“There’s no way of knowing whether or not those people are telling the truth. That’s why going online is my last resort.” He couldn’t help but feel like Kaede was being a little pushy on the matter, but Shuichi wasn’t going to get impatient with her about it. He knew that he’d kept the truth from her for a long time, and that probably stung. He knew that he needed to be able to share as much as she wanted to know in order to make it up to her. “Part of me isn’t really sure if I want to know, though. This ability has been nothing but a pain for my entire life, and after we do this case I never want to touch it again.”

“But after this case, you could become a really high profile psychic detective!” the pianist was more excited about it than Shuichi could ever hope to be, and part of him wondered if this was a sign that his best friend was starting to accept his abilities as the truth after thinking about it for a while. He hoped so. “You could work in haunted houses all over the world and give families a little bit of closure!”

“I’m more interested in solving cases that give closure and bring the truth in more conventional means, Kaede.” He sighed - he couldn’t deny that he would enjoy being able to use the words of ghosts to help him solve murders, but… “Courts and the police might not take ‘the ghost of the deceased told me so’ as genuine evidence, and me having been involved in cases like this one might make me as a detective look less credible and trustworthy. I want to be a real detective, someone who brings criminals to justice. I can’t do that if no courts see me as credible.”

The pianist sighed, rested her elbow on the desk and her cheek in her hand. “Man, I guess you really are telling the truth,” she spoke softly, and Shuichi felt a light pang of pain in his chest when he realized that Kaede had been just grilling him to see if he really was psychic. “You don’t have anything to gain from telling anybody you can see ghosts, since you’re not looking to get famous or get money from it, and the way you talk about it is too genuine to be a lie.”

“Unless he’s a good liar, like me!” Kokichi chirped, deciding to poke his head into the conversation from the front desk where he was still marking images and files regarding Hope’s Peak Academy. Kaede shot a glare his way, and the little trickster let out an obnoxious ‘nishishi’ before going quiet and returning to his task.

“Maybe hiring you to work with me was a bad idea. You’re learning too much about interrogation.” Shuichi would be more hurt about her not believing him if he didn’t completely understand. Kaede was a little more trusting and emotionally motivated than he was, but she was still a reasonable person, and wasn’t as naive as she acted. She was smart, and had worked in a detective agency for the last year; of course she would look for facts and the way he talked. “Do you have any questions that aren’t trying to get me to prove I can see dead people?” His words were more teasing and joking than anything else; he had been through enough being upset with Kaede in the past day to last him a lifetime.

Kaede let out a little laugh, and rubbed her neck sheepishly. “Come on, I was curious, it wasn’t  _ all _ trying to make sure you weren’t lying to me or trying to scare me.” She paused very briefly, before getting a fascinated look in her eyes and leaning towards the detective again. “I do, though. How can you tell the difference between a living person and a dead person? When did you start thinking that being able to see ghosts wasn’t normal? Have you ever been scared really badly by a ghost? When you fainted in Hope’s Peak, was it because of a ghost or were you feeling sick?”

The detective blinked. That was a lot of questions pushed out in a very short amount of time, and he was glad he’d been friends with Kaede long enough that he could make out her words when she started talking in such an excitable manner. “I can tell the difference between ghosts and people because they look a little different. Ghosts have a little bit of a blue tint to their skin, and… I don’t know how to describe it… the aura around them is different. I feel a little more uneasy around dead people than I do around living people. It’s like… you know that feeling when you step into a place that’s supposed to be haunted? It feels like that, but a lot stronger and more concentrated since it comes from a specific source instead of being spread out across an entire building.”

Kaede nodded along to what he was saying, big violet eyes glittering with fascination and excitement, and Shuichi continued talking. “I started thinking that seeing ghosts wasn’t normal when we were little and still spent a lot of time in the library. We read a story about a little kid that used ghosts to solve mysteries, and it being seen as weird. And no, I’ve never been scared really badly by a ghost.” The lie came out of his throat a little roughly; not audibly, but it hurt him to lie to his best friend after so many years of pretending one of the most unshakable parts of him didn’t exist. She didn’t seem to catch on, though. “Yeah, when I fainted in the school, it was because I felt really overwhelmed by the feeling of people begging for help and grabbing for me, and it was just too much to handle.”

“So that’s why you wouldn’t tell me what happened,” Kaede responded, the tone of her voice hinting that the question had been bothering her ever since. She nodded slowly, and looked like she was going to speak up again - before she could, however, a loud alarm sounded from Shuichi’s phone, and he grabbed for it on instinct almost immediately.

**HOPE’S PEAK INVESTIGATION - 11PM - 30 MINS FROM NOW.**

The notification made his mouth go dry, and Shuichi swallowed heavily as he stood from his desk. “We’d better get going, Kirumi’s expecting us soon,” he explained quickly as he got up and moved out of the office.

Tonight, he was going to try and exorcise a spirit for the first time.

There was absolutely no settling the anxiety filling his body.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The investigation continues.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact i discovered in the middle of this chapter that i can make my laptop's keys light up life is beautiful

All things considered, Shuichi probably should not have been walking the path to a haunted school with his nose buried in a book, but he wanted to make absolute sure that he knew what he was doing. It was like cramming for a final exam at the last possible moment, but with much more stress and threat to his life added to the mix, and the detective was so wrapped up in trying to memorize everything he could about preventing possession and generally being injured by ghosts that he didn’t even notice that Kokichi had caught up to him, Kaede, and Kaito and stuck his foot out in Shuichi’s path.

He came very close to tripping, but managed to catch himself at the last moment and felt soreness blossoming up his leg. The detective winced and straightened himself out, hoping that his friend hadn’t just made his job for the night more difficult. “Was that really necessary?” he asked, kneeling down to collect the book from where he’d dropped it to the side. Shuichi blinked, found upon finally looking up that Kaede and Kaito had rushed ahead of him - or at least, he figured that much since they were no longer walking on either side of him like they had been when they got to the gates.

“Well, would you have quit being so distracted if I hadn’t?” Kokichi asked, his tone teasing and hands behind his head as he fell into stride beside Shuichi. “You were walking so slow, I was pretty sure you weren’t even gonna get to the front door until sunrise! Why weren’t you paying more attention to where you were going, Shuichi?” The question was punctuated by a harsh poke to the detective’s shoulder, making him wrinkle his nose slightly in annoyance. Kokichi was lucky he had been helpful to this investigation… not that Shuichi had the guts to tell him to leave, honestly. The much smaller boy had been one of his closest friends for as long as he could remember.

Kokichi had helped Shuichi through some serious self esteem problems and dysphoria from a young age. He couldn’t help but admire the way his friend carried himself, always seemingly confident and ready for almost anything despite the mental health struggles Shuichi knew hid just beneath the mischievous and teasing grin that was almost always on his features. He was intelligent, more perceptive than he made himself out to be, and on the rare occasion a case interested him he was an ally whose role could not be understated. Even his lies could often help lead them to the truth, when someone needed to be questioned and only false promises and threats could get through to them. More than once, the detective had asked him to work with his agency full time instead of poking his head in whenever it suited him, but had been turned down every time. He still had faith that, maybe, someday Kokichi would get bored of whatever it was he did and decide to do the one man good cop bad cop routine he enjoyed so much for a living, but until then, he couldn’t even consider pushing him away from a case as big as this.

The school’s atmosphere as Shuichi stepped inside was just as oppressive and overwhelming as it had been the first time, and he had to take a deep breath and steel himself before he could walk much further. “I wonder if the air will clear up any once all of the the spirits have been cleared out of the school.” He couldn’t imagine people coming here to learn every day, sitting amongst ghosts that they couldn’t see but might be able to feel. 

The school was big, but fairly easy to memorize. Shuichi was able to make his way back to the trial room fairly easily, guided by his memory of the previous night and the relentless tugging on his senses that got stronger and stronger the more he walked. It was like something knew he could help, wrapped its arms around him and tugged him to where he was needed; it was hard to keep himself from falling into the mindless zombie state from the first time he walked into Hope’s Peak.

It was a good thing he did try to keep track of himself, too, because he probably would have walked right through Mukuro Ikusaba if he wasn’t paying any attention. The ghost of his mother was much fainter than she had been the night before, looking tired and aged, and concern was the first thing that crossed through Shuichi’s head as he stopped walking and tried desperately to push down the persistent tugging in his chest trying to drag him back towards the trial room. “Mukuro? What’s wrong?” Had something happened between the spirits since last night?

He hoped not. Shuichi considered the idea of Junko Enoshima showing up, wreaking havoc and making his job difficult, terrorizing him and potentially hurting his friends… he swallowed thickly, tried to ignore the anxiety blossoming in his chest. She hadn’t even told him what was going on, and here he was, automatically thinking about the worst case scenario, getting worried about things he didn’t even need to think about just yet. That was a habit of his, which made his job as a detective much, much harder than it needed to be; anxiety made him paranoid, terrified, and only worsened after difficult cases like this one, where he needed to deal with angry people (or angry ghosts) that didn’t deserve the hand they had been dealt and knew how unfair the entire situation was, wanted revenge and wanted it now.

“Have you figured out how you can free everybody in the school yet?” Mukuro asked, her voice flat as she got right to the point, and Shuichi nodded. He saw his ghostly mother’s shoulders slump in relief before she straightened back up and continued speaking. “Okay. Good. In that case, I have a request. I don’t want to be exorcised as early as I died, I still have some unfinished business I need to sort out. But I think it would be a good idea to do the exorcisms in the order in which everyone died. The older spirits might go down easier, and the rest would be able to know when their turns are.”

“They’re paying attention to what’s going on?” Shuichi asked, but he supposed that it wasn’t all that unusual. The dead students had been in the school for twenty years; it made sense that they would want to keep an eye on anything new. He shook his head, and let out a sigh. “Yeah. I think I can do that. I’ll need help remembering who died where and in what order, but it’s a good idea.”

“That leads to my second request.” Mukuro looked away from him then, and though she tried to keep her serious composure, Shuichi spotted the faintest change in the way she carried herself. Her body tensed slightly, one hand went behind her back to grip at the opposite wrist; grey eyes couldn’t quite meet her son’s. She looked awkward, almost like a teenager trying to talk about something embarrassing - which he supposed she was. “I want you to get ahold of your mother, bring her here. She lived through the killing game, she was friends with the victims… having her nearby might help your case a little, which is really something you need if you’re also related to Junko Enoshima, and she absolutely knows the order and location of every murder of the killing game.

“Not only that, but… I died without her even knowing that we’d been together before. I died and left her pregnant and alone. I never even got to find out that you were going to exist.” She sighed shakily, and sorrow filled Shuichi’s chest and mind. It had never really hit him how sad the circumstances around his birth were; Kyoko had always tried to remain emotionless and factual when she talked to him about it. Never held the truth from him, but never told him how she felt about it, either. “I want to talk to her, even if it’s just one more time. I want to tell her she was important to me. I just… I just want her to know that I never wanted her to get stuck in the killing game, I never wanted her to be alone…”

Shuichi didn’t think for once in his life as he stepped forward and tried to wrap his arms around his mother, but found that his body just passed right through hers. Of course he couldn’t touch her; most of the time ghosts couldn’t be touched. Feeling a little sheepish, he turned around to face Mukuro again. “Yeah, of course.” A shaky sigh left him. “I’ll call my mom, and make sure that she comes here. I don’t know if she’ll be able to come  _ tonight, _ but she’s… I’m sure she’ll believe me. She’s always believed me before, I don’t know why she would say no if she thought this would help.”

For most of his life, Kyoko had been the one person that believed him whenever he mentioned offhand that he had a conversation with a dead person, that he ran into another ghost. She didn’t usually carry on the discussion, but he never got the sense that she thought he was insane. He had stopped communicating with her, too, about his ability to see and speak to ghosts, once he got to be in his mid to late teens and decided that he no longer wanted to acknowledge his abilities, but…

He had faith that Kyoko would believe that Hope’s Peak was haunted, and he had faith that she would come to her son’s aid - and to Mukuro’s. Shuichi couldn’t help but wonder if she had similar abilities to his, but he didn’t want to ask; didn’t want to pry. He only hoped that Kyoko would be able to see Mukuro and would be able to speak to her like she wanted. Mukuro deserved to be able to have a two way conversation with the girlfriend she left behind instead of just rambling on and on to someone who didn’t even truly know that she was there, without needing Shuichi to translate.

“Sayaka Maizono died in the dorm room that should be labelled as Makoto Naegi’s. In the bathroom. She was found slumped in the shower, and I think that she should just be pacing around somewhere in that hallway if she’s not still in the room. I’ve run into her a couple of times in the gym, but she doesn’t usually leave.” There was a small pause, and Mukuro slumped. “Some of the spirits around the school have been… a little corrupted by the emotional state they were in when they died, whether it be anger or stress or sadness. Sayaka was one of them, which makes sense… she was the first victim. She was told that her friends were in danger, tried to kill someone and just got killed instead.”

Shuichi nodded, and swallowed thickly. Corrupted by emotion? What would that even look like? He had been to a fairly large amount of crime scenes in his time, had seen a lot of spirits whose lives were cut tragically short by violent crime - had seen a lot of ghosts who were angry and sad and suffering. But he had never met any spirit who was corrupted by emotion, whatever that meant.

He let out a heavy sigh, decided that he would just have to think more about it when he got to the dorm hall, and unlocked his phone. Shuichi pressed the contact for his mother, began walking down the halls of Hope’s Peak as he waited for her to pick up the phone.

“Hello?” her voice came out loud and clear, tone professional - Shuichi supposed she must have been working late.

“Hey, Mom. About how soon can you get to Hope’s Peak Academy?”


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sayaka Maizono.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i decided to try and update this fic a little more often since it's the longest of all the works i have going right now and if i keep my every two weeks standard rn it'll take me years to finish it off hddhgdf

He could feel the air the moment he stepped into the dorm hall; he could feel the despair felt by the victims of the 78th class’ killing game as soon as he arrived. It laid heavily on his chest, it felt as though it was going to drag him into the floor, into the dark depths that had driven so many to suicide, to murder, to other deplorable acts. Shuichi clenched his fist by his side, let out a heavy sigh and closed his eyes for a moment before he could continue walking. He read the signs on the doors - the names of the dead stared at him from a majority of the rooms he passed.

Hifumi Yamada. Yasuhiro Hagakure, one of the five survivors. Leon Kuwata. Sakura Oogami. Aoi Asahina, another survivor. Chihiro Fujisaki, Celestia Ludenberg… he hesitated momentarily at the sign reading “JUNKO ENOSHIMA,” his heart dropping slightly as he remembered what Mukuro had gone through - remembered that she had been pressured into dressing up as her sister and helping her with the killing game only to be murdered in the process. He closed his eyes, sucked in a heavy breath before moving forward. He couldn’t think too much about it, he needed to have his emotions under control, he needed to know that he could get through these exorcisms without getting too overwhelmed by emotion. It was okay to get a little empathetic, but he didn’t want to have a mental breakdown in front of one.

Rantaro trailed behind him, having agreed to help him with the exorcism - Shuichi was a little hesitant to ask somebody to attend his first exorcism, potentially distract him and make things harder, but he didn’t want to do it completely on his own either. He had asked Kaede and Kaito to stay behind elsewhere in the school, to greet his mother when she got to the school and make sure that she knew a bit more about what was going on than what he could hurriedly explain over the phone.

He knew what room was the one he was looking for before he even reached it. It was like the dorm room of Makoto Naegi was pushing against him, trying to force him back further down the hallway and away from whatever spirit was stuck in there. “Can you feel that?” he asked Rantaro, turning his head quickly to the other boy with his heart racing in his chest. Shuichi could feel anxiety, terror, panic, anger… a cocktail of emotions he had never experienced in his life.

“A little, yeah,” Rantaro responded, and Shuichi spotted the faintest amount of fear on the taller boy’s normally relaxed face. It only really showed in bright green eyes; it was like he was trying to remain the calm exterior he always did just to comfort the detective. “Do you think she’s giving off that energy? I can usually feel the ghosts, but… but I’ve never felt it this strong before.” Shuichi knew that Rantaro’s psychic abilities were normally limited to just senses unless the spirit was extremely strong to the point they could make themselves visible, so he couldn’t help but wonder if the other boy’s intuition was any stronger than his own, since it didn’t have to share with the ability to see them.

He passed by the door of Sayaka Maizono, and he had never felt so terrified as he did when he approached the door of Makoto Naegi. His heart was pounding so hard that he felt like it was going to beat its way out of his ribcage, his vision blurring slightly as he reached to the doorknob. Shuichi felt like he was going to collapse on the ground, forcing himself to close his eyes and breathe deeply for a moment; he turned his head to face Rantaro, beginning to feel a little light headed. “There’s not… not really much of any other explanation I can think of right now. I feel like I’m about to pass out.”

“We don’t have to go in yet if you’re not ready. This is the first time either of us is doing anything like this, and I’m sure Kirumi will understand if you can’t do an entire exorcism after only one sleep deprived day to research.” Rantaro’s hand went to rest against Shuichi’s shoulder, and the detective was a little soothed by the contact from his friend. He swallowed heavily, and turned back to the door.

The detective took another moment to calm himself down before he shook his head. “No, I made a promise that I would fix this and I’m going to. Nobody that died here deserves to be stuck here any longer. It’s already been twenty years.” One more deep breath, and he opened the door, feeling himself all but blasted with a rush of rage and panic as he finally stepped into the dorm room. His heart rate sped up so much that he wasn’t entirely sure that he wasn’t having a heart attack.

Every step towards the bathroom was harder. The room was in immaculate condition, a sure sign that Kirumi had been inside and had cleaned it up, but it seemed that every time Shuichi blinked he could see the room in a state of disaster. Walls and floors scratched, bed unmade, objects strewn about. His feet were held down by cement blocks, but he pushed himself forward nonetheless until he reached the door to the bathroom. The door had been replaced, and opened easily - but the moment he could finally see inside, he had to clasp a hand over his mouth to make sure he didn’t scream as he stepped back.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t used to crime scenes, because he was. He investigated them for a living and made sure to solve the mysteries behind them. But he had never, not once in his life, felt such a rush of emotion upon seeing one, and he had never walked into one that very clearly wasn’t supposed to be there. Blood splattered and pooled in the shower, the number 11037 clearly visible on the tiles. By far the most gruesome part of the scene, however, was the victim herself, Sayaka Maizono.

She was barely recognizable. Blood dribbled from her mouth and blossomed from the knife forced into her stomach, and her hair was in a state of disarray. Her head was tilted as she hovered a foot or so off the ground, her eyes blank white and a dark aura completely surrounding her. Shuichi had seen a lot of pictures of the dead idol in his life, in old photo albums and case files and just general pop culture, and he had always seen her bright and smiling - according to her closest living friend, Makoto, she was almost always like that in person as well. But in death? In death, Sayaka wasn’t even Sayaka.

He stood still as a board, but her head still turned slowly to face him. She moved toward him in a blur, and Shuichi stepped back quickly - he slipped, landed flat on his ass and tried to scramble back as well as he could. The detective knew that he probably shouldn’t let her see how terrified he was, but she was by a long shot the most terrifying spectre he had ever seen. Maybe it was because she was left to have her rage and panic build up over the course of two decades, maybe it was because she was corrupted by her emotions as Mukuro said that she was, but Shuichi was honestly terrified that he would die at any moment. He supposed he was feeling exactly what she felt when she died, scared and angry and overwhelmed. Despite him trying to get away, she ended up in his face within moments.

Sayaka tried to grab for him, but she passed right through his shoulders. A chill so icy it hurt passed through where her touch hit him, and he felt like he was about to throw up.  **“Who are you?”** she asked, her voice booming and filled with rage.  **“Why are you here?”** Her face twisted into an expression much more frightened, and she moved back quickly.  **“Are you going to hurt me, too? Is that what you’re here for? Are you going to kill me?”** The idea to tell her that she was the one that set up the murder, not Leon, crossed through Shuichi’s mind, but he decided that probably wouldn’t help his case and chose not to. Instead, he stood up on shaking legs, tried to sound less terrified than he was.

“No, no, I’m not here to do anything like that,” Shuichi responded, relieved that his voice came out a little stronger than his body felt. He approached Sayaka with his hands up, forcing himself to breathe. “Sayaka, listen. You’re dead. You’ve been dead for twenty years. I’m here to help you. You don’t want to be stuck in this school anymore, do you?” He hoped that his voice was as gentle as he intended, and he thought that he could see the faintest flash of blue irises in her eyes.

He glanced over his shoulder, found that Rantaro was still behind him. He looked to be in even more shock than Shuichi was; he took that as a sign that the other boy could see Sayaka as well. Once he got himself to look back over at the ghost, though, she had already gotten herself back to looking terrifying and deadly. **“No, I don’t want to go anywhere. I’m not dead. I can’t be.”** Her brows furrowed, making her look twice as murderous, and Shuichi had to bite down the urge to scream again. **“I still need to get out of here, I need to make sure my friends are safe.”**

“They all survived.” He thought so, anyway. He remembered Ayaka Haneyama and Satomi Aoba having somewhat successful solo careers, at least. “Everyone is okay, Sayaka. Makoto Naegi even survived your killing game.” He gestured behind him. “That’s Makoto’s son. He has three kids, and he taught all of them about you. You might have died, but you haven’t been forgotten, I promise.” He felt himself getting a little more confident as he continued communicating with the spirit. “I know you must be tired. I know you must want to stop pacing around this school. Please, just let me help you.” He swallowed the lump quickly forming in his throat, extending a shaking hand to her.

She looked down at his hand, lowering slowly from where she was hovering as she glanced between the extremity and Shuichi’s face. He seemed to be getting through to her, and when she spoke up again, she actually sounded a little closer to being human. “I can rest?” Sayaka asked, her voice soft and hesitant as she slowly raised her hand up to her chest. When she looked up to his face again, he could see her eyes the way they must have been in life - royal blue, but so… so tired.

He nodded, and reached his hand out a little further. “You can rest, Sayaka, I promise. You can go somewhere there’s no more pain.” He was vaguely aware of Rantaro approaching behind him, and the dead idol placed her hand gently in the detective’s.

The taller boy put his hand against Shuichi’s shoulder, and the detective closed his eyes.

His heart rate slowing as the mood of the room did, Shuichi closed his eyes and imagined a light for Sayaka to go through. He imagined her being freed, the chains holding her down to their realm to bring her to somewhere she could finally rest. He felt the cold weight in his hand beginning to fade, to disappear, and within a couple minutes of concentrating the coldness and pain in the room dissipating.

When he opened his eyes again, Sayaka was gone, and the bathroom had gone back to the immaculate state Kirumi had left it in. Shuichi sighed heavily, and leaned back against Rantaro.

“You did it.”

“We did it.”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much for reading! if you enjoyed, please let me know with a kudos and a comment!


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